...is some minding swoop of your brow,
mimicking in your doleful eyes,
some ember fled to soot-drunken clouds
of mumbling mothers abandoned from cradles above.

Distillation, did her husband remember,
like banquets of poor bread that suffered in baskets,
no tender fish to oil the hair or curse the breath.

The casket feigned bitter chocolate,
hallucination the refuge of finger bones replacing ribs,
and what priest would sneer beneath his cloak,
as he turned away to cough and sympathize under unheavenly wings?

Woman, woman, you've cut my pie all wrong.
The piece goes like that, obtuse and feared,
and your tongue at my knees when days do retire--

her melody's a ***** shriek,
pawing through the birthplace of sea glass
and sharp bruises of scents through her palms,
where perhaps one lingers thirty years too long,

taking one year of fetal distraction.