ARTHUR BOYLE

NINE BY NINE

Heaven cooks novenas freely in its kitchen:
a thicket studding currants
in the nine unleavened rings;
feeding
each other from each other
with the promise of a triumph
of the long unbidden summer
and a hummer in the graces

You n me babe––Terror the Divine,
chlorides sheltered heartside
and a scheme of inexactitude––
long across the country, a marriage in every state
Analog maps of numbers and flaunting
in the poolside manner of the criminal

Forgive me this the culmination
of all our love trajectory,
a labor unfulfilled

Forgive my long unwanting
Or that's not really right
The apposites of apices'
death to restart feeding

in a quatrain's notion
of completion,
a rectilinearity
bent into a circle

J. Arthur Boyle is pleasant, co-editor of The Amenia Free Review, and adjunct at CUNY. Work is in or coming from Annulet, Bruiser, the CRB, The Chicago Review, Community Mausoleum, Fence, GROTTO, Verso, and other lovely places.