I don't deserve your Riesling
by Sandra Simonds

My architect builds my love from scratch
and he uses a defibrillator
when the pharmacist urges only ipecac.

He patents the enzymes of my tachycardia 
and my two lungs are twice the fluffy
bunny slippers of his jet stream robotics.     
 
A fire ant crawls from my pupil
to a femur-sized fruit bowl of fermenting
bananas and I piss lemonade every day
so that the sky will sing to me.

Of my knock-knock knees   
he uses three mints that spark a
who’s there brushfire—
a telephone’s cross-wired correspondence:
yes, that’s the webbing of feet
sewed to the face of an oakless metropolis.

I’m no more a cast for wrists that melt
and touch them when melting is good
for your eardrums than the Louvre the houses
thirty-five thousand works of art.

You can punch a nostril in the pleather trampoline
of my navel and a few bits of gravel will fall
to the floorboards—  maybe a pigeon if you’re lucky.

My architect builds my love from scratch.
He puts a teaspoon of baking soda on my tongue and
teaches me an exercise to turn it into a stone.

When he is done he sends me my cardiogram,
a cd of love songs soaked in iodine and an invoice
with a post-it note that says  
 you may never amount to anything.

Other poems by Sandra Simonds in ActionYes #3:
Writing my Bike in Circles around this Poem to Prove that I Persist
LetMe Out