Today's poem is by Nathan Xavier Osorio

How to Cook a Wolf
        Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.
                        —M.F.K. Fisher

My mother fell in love with the way you cracked
into an urchin. How you kept the blade

        along its purple skull

                until it welcomed you

anxious to be separated for the first and last time.
Listen—from our window we can hear the Southern Pacific

        fume in the station. The turquoise room

                in the pleasure dome is only for the long-fingered

and bored, so come with me and climb onto the roof.
Sometimes, I remember best when I put my back to the warm cinderblock,

        other times I have to reach my arm across your shoulder

                to find where you end. Darling, if you find me first

on the desert road I strung together with pins of light
or in the aqueduct blooming with graffiti,

        this is where the sweet rot of leaves is coming from,

        where the colony of urchins swarm beneath the dock,

        where the twirling blades of the Black Hawk lift your hair.

We have been careful not to admit that we have wolves in parts of our home
we no longer visit. We have been careful to ignore the infinite snarling

        of daytime, so come up for breath

        and forgive me nights you can't sleep.

Yes, I will keep my ear to the floorboards and listen closely
for the sound of her parts assembling. Her lonesome days

        are spent at the oceanfront,

        the place where she drags out her dead.
I've brought you a canasta of strawberries,
the marble kind of gift from your childhood.

        These things

                        have been outside your reach until now.

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Copyright © 2024 Nathan Xavier Osorio All rights reserved
from Shō Poetry Journal
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission