Transubstantiation

By Tobi Cogswell

To be hungry is to want
to chew your heart out,
eat it for dinner.

and that is my wildness for you.

Slowness descends upon the languid night sky,
frosting the lights with buttercream
chilled to mad proportions.

I watch my own hands reach for your face
like time-lapse photos
of opening peonies.
In winter it is hardly to be believed.

Lie back with me and watch the fire-smoke make
eye-level thunderclouds tumbling East.
I will be a ghost silhouetted against the bright,
my baser metals a gleam in the alchemist’s

eye as I dance from the flames,
unheard music thundering
just below the horizon.

Yes, I am hungry for your heart.
I am moved to have it.
As bread needs salt…

Previously published in Welter, 2013