I do not know what become of
Frank’s biological right leg,

whether it was severed
and incinerated or he

was born with only one
and crutch bound until

fitted with his first
artificial leg.

I  do understand the look on
on his face after he unlocks

the prosthetic from his
femur and massages

the foot pain on
his stump.

Here I am,
caught cutting up my palms on broken plates,
palms that banged on pots with wooden spoons
palms that I kept warm in your pockets when I had no
gloves.

Here I am,
sitting once more at the edge of the earth
legs dangling over the side,
legs that danced on stage before they broke
legs that wrapped around you when you carried me
to the couch.

I swing my feet and toss a penny into the
abyss.

I have always loved it here,
with the waterfalls that pour into the sky
and the hollowness of the ground beneath my
weight.

Don't slip.

Here I am,
laying on my stomach with my head over the
edge,
I can see stars below me,
my hair is blowing.

Hair that my mother used to brush while I
fidgeted on the three-legged stool,
hair you pushed out of my damp face to
see my eyes
when I was flying.

I always knew the world was
flat.

Would you like to see it?
If you unwound my brain you'd find a map
to the edge of the world.

It's okay,
the rest of me has already been
unraveled anyway.

Sun draped across her legs
crossed beneath her like
folded wings,
The Carnivore watches.

Satan said, 'stay naked as you came,'
so here she sat, white as mushroom,
raw as shrimp.

She leans, a sifted sack of flour, against her wall;
love rising within her like a cloud of mosquitoes,
for here comes her Plant Eater.

In her nakedness she hides,
watching him trot across the floor,
his movements thoughtful and slow as cooling lava,
shrugging on his brontosaurus suit like an old bathrobe.

He has vegetarian ankles,
his bare feet are splashed with mud
like an old truck.

Carnivore that she is, she bursts out of hiding
naked as Satan,
and she demands her heart.

“I do not love you,”
she lies,
and points to the cedar box in his soft hands.
“Now give me back my heart.”

“No.”
he cries,
and runs from her.

She knows the box is locked and has no key,
though the brontosaurus has not been told
that there is no hope
for this particular heart.

He hides from her behind a tree,
but the tree puts down its other leg and walks away
leaving him exposed as the naked Meat Eater
who catches up to him now.

This time,
before she can get to the tying by the wrist to the chair,
he swallows the box
and holds it in his belly.

My mother was a writer.
I remember her,
papers spread out upon a bed sheet in the sand,
stacked pebbles protecting her work from the wind
as I made drip-castles at the water's edge
and braided crowns from wild poppies.
I would run to her so she could
rub grape sunscreen into my sandy shoulders
and I asked her once,
“Mama,
is that poetry?”
and she said “No little one,
you are poetry,
this only tries to be.”
and I thanked her,
and ran back to the water
to search for flat stones to skip,
and thought no more of poetry.