Ghazal for Max
As long as we both shall live, we said, in a single flat breath.
But who can forget how he’s coming for us, that rat death?
Little and littler we are eating up our bitten days.
This is just ordinary dying, not the black death.
Lovers, we are in a house in a rainstorm in the countryside.
He’s coming to play chess with us, to eat us up, fat death.
In bed in the sunlight with our legs intertwined, you are warm.
I am crying out to you again and again my little cat death.
I wrote our love in wet cement, but that’s been excavated since.
Let M.N. and A.I. see this through to that old and honest fact death.
— Amy Isikoff Newell, liner notes include that this poem was written in November 2016, before the current pandemic, or at least that is the information provided by the Minecraft ransomeware entity that is forcing me to publish all these poems.
Ghazal for Max