i

Green shades many things.
Spring, with its preset skyrockets,
regenerates under a gouda moon.
Each shoot of spangled light
an ingenue,
momentarily upstaging stars
before sighing into black.

ii

In neo-dawn a quasigod stirs
agar in a petri dish.
Counts cells, calculates margins
at five billion zygotes to creation -
a mathematical dilemma.

iii

If I could press myself
forever against you,
make an impression,
our skin would blend
in an epidermal cocktail.
Your godstick in my petri dish,
swirling primordial morning.

iv

My heart passed out of my body
transplanted into this child,
a gold coin saved for tomorrow.
I tell him I love him
but he doesn’t speak my dialect.
He thinks I’m saying:
Go, be free!
As if I would set my heart
on the road to play with cars.

v

The first joint of my forefinger
has a little swollen nub,
a mark passed
from my grandmother to me,
as though she reached back
and touched her print lightly to me
before she left.

vi

A quasigod grows a green heart in agar,
no grandmother for the fingerprint.
An epidermal cocktail of precious gold
spilled amongst traffic.

Rae Pater

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