I recycle poems every time I recycle love —

floating images from high school textbooks,

free style from the time of freedom,

synecdoches from the time when one stood

for many and a deaf tone country sang

its praise Stalin-style, similes once similar

to talent, the dusk and the musk,

good ideas, bad ideas, crazy ideas,

girlfriends, boyfriends, fuck friends,

rags, old shoes and back-in-style tops

and bottoms from the 1980s,

hair styles, earrings without promise rings,

scabs and scars, my freshly shaved thighs,

the good-to-go-s for when it’s all good,

empty bottles, dirty bottles, cans, the milk

in my breasts,

the grief recovery handbook, books,

Romanian-English pocket dictionaries,

my hope to bear a child with a man

who loves me back —

unnervingly.