Yolk Yellow

by A.M. Kennedy

I don’t want to fill the plate up with fishbones, I tell Allison at the
feast
She nods and pushes the lemon cake across to me.
I am a gorge, a swell, I am living long enough
to tell you delicate words in the hours of early morning.

The romance is an egg crack —
just gentle enough to splinter the shell,
not so hard you pierce the yolk within.

I love you with the tender of the night, the lutescent dawn.
I am in the graveyard exorcising all the deaths that lived within
me,
and laying them down in the peaceful dirt.

Filthy sweet, I don’t want it to make sense,
all I need it to be is this, yellow icing and batter,
dripping down my hands, something that doesn’t
hurt when I swallow.