he’d shorn it from her: this thing

racing with him now to the kitchen where

it could kick the whole

house down, jump the fence, tear

off with him across oceans.

The white skin sagged at the neck.

Perhaps, if they took this face off, his father

would return and he could stop crying,

though when the mask came off

the boy did not stop crying: there were

powdery creases now in his father’s face,

and his skin smelled bitter, burning.

His father tossed the mask aside

and pressed his son’s face into his neck.

And still the boy did not stop crying, could not stop

seeing that wild, gray face even in sleep, and so woke

crying again the next morning, regardless

of his mother’s songs, his father’s smiles,

regardless of how his parents tried

to make a joke of it. How they laughed

and laughed, who loved him

and could not console him.

Io

Io

Of course, everyone wondered about the sex:

how Jane and she were handling it

since the bike accident last May that left her

quadriplegic. Perhaps some had always

wondered: Jane, the pretty teacher

who’d left her husband for her; she, the knob-

kneed, almond-eyed pastry chef who biked

each day to the café where she worked,

swinging her ten-speed over a shoulder just

like a boy, Jane said, delighting

in this strength, though now she couldn’t swing

a cat over her shoulder. Her arms

she can barely lift past her sides, her legs

are both there and gone, the spinal cord severed

from when the car behind her clipped

a tire, sending her face-first

into the pavement. Having learned

she’d never walk again, her own

thoughts soon gravitated to sex: nights

with Jane curled on the living room futon

they used as a couch until they gave up

all pretense and left the bed spread

open to let them move more easily

from talking to making love, the burn

of sex’s ache still vivid in her fingers, she

stunned by the fact it is not numbness now

but total feeling that defines her. Her body

is no longer the source of pleasure

but constant pain, a dim prickling

in thighs and feet, phantom

throbbings up through her pelvis,

though it is the pleasure that she mourns

most clearly: that slight dampness

to her scalp after a run, or the tightening

muscles in her legs as she stood

and pushed against the bike pedals.

She’d never known how much her body

was meant for this, trapped

inside these shrinking muscles that at times

make her feel as if she were two

women: one confined to bed

or chair, the other with her hands

still cupping Jane’s breasts. She remembers

once being read a story about a girl

taken by a god who, to shield her

from his wife’s jealousy, changed her

into a cow. The tale was meant first either