Richie Hofmann

We fill duffle bags with ripe fruit,

tearing off leaves that feel like human ears.

We put flowers in our mouths,

the two of us whose bodies have no thickness.

We undress in the pink room,

where the blinds are still closed.

Summer is disintegrating, the heat unravels

in the wind. I feel the skeleton inside my chest.

Outside, emaciated dogs bark in German.

The flowers fade like paintings.

Parasites chew the still water

we held our breath under.

Breeze tears through the fibers

of our bathing suits drying on the back of a chair.

We are contemporaries, born in
the worst plague year for our kind.
It is May, locust shells in the screen doors.
The surf is thick with ash. An unnamed man
roams the beach, looking for a place
deep inside himself, like a room lined in silk.
You are a piece of shit, like me.
Between us, three ceramic teeth
glued to our jaws. I leave my hair curly
for seven months. I love you because you can’t be destroyed by love;
we are immune
to one another: my perfect Tennyson, your fingers
tearing the metal strings of a guitar. We stop
wearing underwear, spring lays its dust over everything,
flies climb our naked shoulders.

My grandfather burned fires when we were kids

down by the lake in a structure he made

from stacked stones, the ash

so soft and powdery, almost white.

There were burnt shards of birch

cracked and black as pieces

of a sarcophagus. You can’t witness your own death,

I remember someone saying in a seminar

while we were discussing a Celan poem

in which the speaker is digging

through the ash. It was a Thursday,

I drank a bottle of mineral water with Ronald,

sun on Holbeinstraße, sun on Morgensternstraße.