Leave a glass of Cranberry before you go

Write a poem that includes these words: bamboozled, bloodlust, bibliography. Have the title include one of these words: contradiction, constellation, cranberry.

I’ll have it with coffee the morning

after we wet the sheets together, let’s unremember

the pool of booze we swam in, how we were bamboozled

by low visibility, some surreptitious starlight or

the way I approached the moon in a pair of heels

legs so long you could never look away, rather

you start to climb, fee-fi-fo-fum

mouth glittering with myth

all gimmicks of self but your body

left behind in the

alluvial charisma below –

hunger, lasciviousness, bloodlust, desire, a

night like this conjures a hundred appellations

my head in the Pleiades, I simply pluck you a star

and pass it down as please me and pleading:

an amended constellation, made in cranberry nail polish

and sloppy cursive, your lost name as its bibliography

with all the rest who tumbled out of the sky,

halfway to the moon, like you.

Just leave the juice by the bed and

no footnote on goodbye.