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.

cretaceous, conjoined,
petrified, spectres arborescent:
another family buried
together and bound
by the mineralizing quality of time.

corals bob out
apple-colored from
the rhythmic income of
glassy tide and make
domiciles
for darting fish
the air has become liquid
a great vat of crystal
melts
in the soggy heat
tide-foam pools around
the beach's welcome ankles like
a lace nightgown at
the feet of
a beautiful, bareskinned woman

We watch the twinkling fish tank
from dry land. We watch
the unwashed
green algae encroach
on chlorinated blue.
It necrotizes. It becomes oil water.
It becomes licorice tea.
There's Venus, eyes stung, blinking.
We watch the swinging silhouette
on old boiled skin,
the true object of interest.
A rat scuffs her pink paws down
the plastic tube and clunks into the dish.
She eats. Black seed held to chest.
We're content, watching.
You hold me to your chest, too.

long licks from the
corrosive coronal

pale dogwood papillae wet-sanding
bare-necked baby girl's earth-salted skin

a square of silicon carbide
refining away dings and scratches

leaving acid streaks and worrying
mouth-shapes into the finish

diligent downturned crescents

to be touched is to lose

top soil to the clutching wind
another game with the warden

a finger to the table saw
dead leaves to the defoliator

she swallows her loot like a librarian
lunching on a primary manuscript