Failure

Light lifts from the lake at dawn
then leaves his face by dusk.
The waterfall is both chorus
of song and silence.
Some days I am like Elijah
ascending on horses into heaven.
Other days are different, so different.

*

Likely Gone

It is yet another afternoon in January.
Convincing again an almost lover to love
herself while reading the book of Job.

Currently he’s in the thick of the whole ordeal.
Of losing everything. Children, servants, sheep—
his wife cooking in the dim silence of the kitchen.

Outside the snow stretches west for miles.
Or would, if houses were not propped up
like tombstones for the living. Suddenly I

can’t help but recall the burrow of bunnies
we years ago had found in our backyard
filled to the brim with marble-eyed babies

shivering inside their patches of brown-white fur.
Outside the snow stretches west for miles. Many
of them are likely gone now. Likely long gone.

*

Morning Sex

How do our knees not buckle
beneath the immense weight

of their own body? What
force does the horse see

that compels her, even from birth,
to keep running away from herself

always? My god. Was the equation
wrong this whole time? Do swans

sing of love before death
or is it the song

which kills them? I fear madly
for the ouroboros. Has he

ever been taught how
to not swallow himself

whole? It is early morning
when pleasure leaves me

and a woman nearly out of love
asks if I am

still doing okay. And I say yes,
yes dear. I am still doing okay.

*

tc Wiggins is an African American poet residing in Cincinnati, Ohio who has been writing since the August of 2022. His poems have appeared in Red Noise Collective, Every Writer, Small World City, Big Windows Review, Door is a Jar, and Diode.