If only to turn the inside into the outside,
to show you everything, slice open the cadaver
and say come in,

for the cells to beckon the lens of the microscope
comeincomein, occasion yourself
to fluid boundaries,

attach yourself to likable surfaces.
If only to unfurl my ever-changing
walls. For you:

a piereced nipple, a cigarette case
engraved with god’s initials, something
sacred and something new, fragments

to a mind everlasting,
seven parts to a carburetor
three parts to an ice maker.

No question ever of sex.
Read this with a hint
of holiness: take what’s given:

tonight it’s the many-headed traffic
signal flashing
red in bleeding fog.

What you take is the sorrow
what you give the alibi: your nervous
tick, your Great Barrier Reef.

Inside, at the heart-shaped center,
you find failure. Go there, give up, take
the garden glove, the unplanted

garden, the spider web embroidered to the ribcage,
the ground under the land
when we landed in paradise.

—Christopher Sindt

from The Land of Give and Take