Poem: Half a Science

 

Ilse Bing, Self-Portrait in Mirrors, 1931

My exhale is cooling

thawing a silver-faced morning. 

A sacred fool, 

prone to forgetting

that just because they 

made the bullet

belong in a body

doesn't mean to shoot. 

Black cat

my mentor, 

on the yoga of loving, 

tells me 

not to persist with a broken metaphor 

in a language that is not your first.