She loved the feeling when a tattoo needle pierced her skin. The physical pain was nothing compared to the mental anguish swirling in her soul. Strangely enough, being stabbed hundreds of times was the most relaxed she ever felt in her life.

SELF-HELP TIPS:**

chip your tooth on the toilet. find your goldfish’s grave and dance on it. that guy in the trench coat at the party didn’t know anything, but let your paranoia balloon you into a parody of yourself, let your limbs hum off the bone. lie to other people about smoking ****. place an excise on weakness: a tearing for every tear. actually, don’t do that. think about your fish going down the drain. a body in orbit, descending, some tide in your stomach rising. don’t do that either. wear a bracelet of crescent dents. sink your chipped tooth into things often. key trench-coat’s car. bite his headlight. remember your arms? they should be back in your skin by now. now, admittedly, doesn’t mean much. dig up your goldfish or the approximate decay and place it back in the bowl you never cleaned. this looks like continuing as usual but isn’t.

Promises made by diviners: first,
the month of my undoing dissected,
uncertainty excised. Fingers splayed,
the prophet makes a pretty ritual
out of ribcage. Says: any bone
can be an oracle bone, given time.
Unhook the vertebrae, then.
Plate apart the musculature
and there’s fate, that red spool,
that hungry spine. Ask me if I
believe. I believe all prophets
are butchers. The small chime
is her fingers at my glass rib
and not my leaving. Ah, fate,
that tangle of guts, of chyme.

(after dean young)

“there are some parts of the human brain
even carps spit out.” but the amygdala births worms
which the fish chew quite sweetly. what isn’t
here: one un-slipped stream, one un-swissed
memory. what is: encephalitis, beetle-black shadow
in the water’s meat. some questions prompt answers
like mouths and feeding. ask yourself why fish bones
are like angels if it isn’t their getting stuck
or the filigree. ask yourself why the first words
of a poem are the skin of an unfathomable ocean,
or why you can only ever think about bodies
and feeding. in the throat, i forgot to say. i take
a layer of algae off the table before sitting down to tuna
and the soup in the coffin that is the kitchen sink.
ask yourself: if the water pressure’s been gone for weeks,
why is your hair always soaked in the morning?