Scholastic sterility decamped to a catocala
backwing dauntlessness.
You flicker in my hands,
mythic as the peplos
at your Prado stone-pooled feet.

My flint-flame Thalia,
I am the cautery under your brand
new fingers, the clueless mark
of your mad dash catzerie.

Tomorrow forgets you but for ivy in drywall
Jesus-toast imprints, your laughter in a hot slice
of ghost against my mouth.

What would the crunch be like?
My grooves in the grooves
of your deciduous molars,
shards of enamel erupting vampiric
into my gums, sinking
into dentin like calcite
spongecake, pulp splattered, cementum
like a magic riddle hidden
amongst stale white ******* Jacks.
The rest strung on a red thread
candy necklace
haloing vertebra C7
like the shark teeth adorned by surfers
or like how sometimes we wear
spoils of the hunt on our bodies
to remind our prey that they,
too, will one day wear our teeth
around their necks.

dip yr tongue it tastes like soap & sodium
clary sage & double bubble pink
threadbare silksheen specked w/ white anthodium
piggy chou & rosette colored sheep
sink! it feels like sleeping
in winter throw & length of flannel sheet

(mary trembles, moss logs twined & twitching
himalayan salt to wash her feet)

Black-plumed
cantors in formation,
all prim in three lines;
black binders,
ink crotchets writ black in their thighs;

sorc'rer
his wand at the ready—
he lifts it in time;
their spellbooks turn
and bleed
and the story reads:

Savior!
This glorious child—
this mother betwined
by fate—
this star—
these sheep—
this rémscela to
the greatest tale ever told.

This ****** mother—

The girls in my stories love to eat each other.
In one, Red Riding Hood lies back on her cloak
with her spooled ringlets falling all around her as
shiny and intimate and obscene as anything.
The Wolf says, "I'll have the heart last."
Red says, "Good, I've wrapped it as a present in
skin, fat, and ribs and I've been saving it just for you."
The Wolf kisses up to her femoral artery where there pulses
live communion and laps her way into carnivorous heaven.
In another, there are two characters
who don't share our names but you're not stupid.
They fly cranes across balconies
with ink-smudged messages folded on the inner planes,
the hearts and brains of paper.
The words are meaningless; the game is to divine intent.
When they talk, phones fall awkwardly from their mouths
and they pray to God the other knows how to unwrap them.
The one who doesn't share your name cuts
through the skin and fat and ribs of sound
and savors one fleeting drink from the well of me.
You choke on it, then swallow, and then we love each other again
with the biting curiosity of strangers.

In the new world, we stood across each other
and radiated the same curvature and vergence.
We kissed and it tasted wrong, like lime-soda
glass and silver; our tongues
were cold and limp like dead fish floating
half-eaten, swirling out to sea.
So we took out our instruments and began again:
my blade, your cup,
my cup, your blade,
refrain and refrain.
Look, but never touch; see, but never understand—
God spares the insensate this particular madness.
The scent of fishermen swims up city drafts
and a hungry dog whimpers.

plunging V of cumulus
hug-warm precious and
buoy-gold fishing line necklace noosed
around your curdled elfin neck.
Green like a star at the throat's hollow:
rhinestone the color of salt-liquor;
the color of the snake-drink—drink and be merry!—
rhinestone the color of the sea past sunset;
lick the salt from its bed, martyr yourself;
sea-bloat your body and hack it to fit
fifty-two years of woman
in a two-foot-tall
baby's coffin.