So take, for joy’s sake, this wild gift of mine.

This uninviting desiccated necklet

Made of dead bees that once turned honey into sunlight.

                                                       –Osip Mandelstam
Touches were newspapers

tucked and benched in Riverside.
Would I borrow from homeless men

their worn coats–bare threads
or gouge from darkened pigeons’ roosts

their salty hearts and by osmosis glide
or hold quartz second-hands?

It was obscure to me then.
Caresses were fries and battered oysters

dropped in Fulton Marketplace.
Would I pray for rags and bones

cemented in grave pools by river tides?
Brooklyn Bridge is damp and dry

but at the ends its cables are opaque.
So let me give you, for the sake of time,

these mites or lice or bedbugs
pinched from hairless hide. Take them–

white knuckles, bug scrawls,
death-defying lapses, synaptic leaps,

this dry mulch kiss–felt necklace strung with ink.