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Nana and the Wolf
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Time’s licked me nut, and right to the bone.
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Once, strange hands furred us down
and we were the nodes on furious mice.
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Now, I operate from this, the dust-kitchen of my lap,
like a cook on conference call,
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stellactating. I am bed iced, and sore.
A splinter, but sopping.
Little girl, climbed right between the nubs,
fretted my belly till it caved, loved me knowing
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and unknowing I had grown our blood
sequestered. In rows, like mushrooms.
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When you were a child we played clean as kettles
and I prized the printpress of your limbs, and skin,
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because my looking read your living out-
Face fleshy little pig’s toe, fanny furled into a truffle.
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But now, you’ve woken up foot wrinkled, and steaming
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with the old game, caught arm down, wearing bite rungs
like chromosomes, saying
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there are more ways to sully a sheet than with sleeping,
hey! as if I had chopped you out of nothing.
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You asked the wrong question when you asked about the wolf.
Enemy
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I have shameless sheared
every thump and scab
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as if loss is olfactory,
and comes plugged to the brain,
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only playing for scarabs,
or scuttling the chord.
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And handling the door!
And riding the train!
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While we heed each glitch
against the pad of love’s fist
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like we’ve ever heard a rattle
from that magic eight ball.
Waitress
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You tell me you shot a monkey once
(with your pellet gun)
and found it curled up the next day,
little, and bibbed in the sill.
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This is what comforts you,
that every year is never your twentieth year,
with all its crawling towards an unsedimented
dinner-table, and so forth.
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Instead, picked and sat in mid-morning traffic,
possessive about panic, prone to heart murmurs,
you see, now, what kind of marriage it would‘ve been,
its unsuccessful sex like its unsuccessful meals.
Glazed over.
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Then I cooked it, you shift. Sorry?
Well, now we’re moving the fish forks, you,
I don‘t know, you always have to eat your first kill.
The sideplate clucks, shocked for me.
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When I said goodbye, you kissed me
quick and on the mouth,
putting yourself between the cutlery
and my talk.
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I felt it read my face out, into the serviette-
small and puckered children, corporate functions,
the queen-size we register for,
and at least a hundred more meals,
in restaurants, like this.
The Snake (put it in front of me):
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With others I cropped,
wielding prospects like rakes.
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Passed over, fresh hoed, each peach-
half a face, or a foot soldered off.
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But when you had gone. I felt, myself,
wedged
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in the fish-shop’s pink stucco.
A wan stick of meat. Just, gutted.
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You were never the boy at work
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fleshing his back for a shoe horn,
his mouth coming cupped.
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You were always a whole.
And left my days bombed. The grout
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of a construction site.
A crack-bed. A blasting of ground.
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Scuff at dirt for long enough
and you will find what can’t be cleared.
Horses Heads:
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Try sit me by the Afrikaans boy,
match our stretchmarks with tongues,
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and watch, we will only learn to love each other
rud-fisted, phonetically.
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My mother didn’t understand the teacher,
who kept a china-plate in place of her palate
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but, then, she couldn’t follow all the implied italics
in the harp-dipped mountains, either,
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so we didn’t move back to the old country
(which it really was,
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the plane-full of your Zias,
gold-rimmed and permanent, even in economy
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looking the way they always did to you:
like money on a farm)
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or stay in the tickertape dentist’s office
that was her Harare,
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settling out and up, instead,
monkeys, and Michele, wild in our acre.
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Please don’t chastise me
for having read my olive-skin off
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like you think if I aired all my sun’d-linen
I’d be any less of a white.
Jakob II:
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Damp as a tuber, bursting with something white-sauced and odorous,
these are the sumstains we tried to deodorize:
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the sweat’s slug suggestion of facial hair, the lint of uncertainty,
thin weevils that burrow through your digestive tract.
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You only wanted to grow it out of compost steel and manufactured
because you forgot the difference between shit and blood.
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The bile-pit is shot up with swab samples now.
Hypothetical sisters you didn’t know how to love,
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ignoring the kisses their bilious knees scraped against yours�
as you tipped them in, grey limb by chalk limb.�
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A wing of skin tucked into your sleeve.
Things you chucked away, things you have heard already.
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