thin as a kitten’s undercoat, though you can’t knit

the cough-like bark, the shining teeth;

you can’t knit the jaw

that unhinges like a book

with a broken spine. The knitted skins

are smaller than their wiry

counterparts, delicate, soft

as the wives the farmers dreamed of, sick of work

their fathers would have said

made them soft, waiting for wives to come and make them

grow rough beards again and trim their nails

so as not to wound the thin

pink lips their fingers opened; though perhaps

for themselves they’d already kept

nails short, beards long, loving

how wet each other’s mouths felt beneath

such bristles, each like a slick surprise: the buttery sex

cut out of the sea urchin, perhaps, a toy they made

from lumps of clay and rusted sewing needles

and slipped to a friend as a secret gift, look

what I have fashioned for you, the figure

conjuring forth alternately the spines

of hedgehogs, porcupines, the teeth

of the little cat-shaped devil that lives

in the bush and cries and cries

like the mating cats that used to draw

my teenaged father onto the porch,

swinging his flashlight into the dark

until he saw two green sets of eyes,

and shot at them with the gun his father left him.

Then he would take his spoils back down to the house where,

for curiosity’s sake, he skinned them:

slicing the pelts up through the belly, soaking the remnants

in formaldehyde, trying

to get the shape of the animals just right

on his mother’s table, knowing

what they should look like but unable

to duplicate it, not even knowing

what their last expression should be, that of pain

or of desire, for they’d died in both, as his mother

sat in the dark with a farmer

my father had to call uncle.

While an ocean away men sat

in their strained circles and pulled

one strand of yarn through the back loop

of another, trying to approximate

their sisters’ stitches, sending samples in their letters

home, telling their mothers, I am different now;

telling their sweethearts, I am changed,

but keeping secret their stories

of a tiger that would steal your soul

if it found you, which is why

they called it a devil, for the way

it slept under the porch; for the way it would cry,

sounding like a lover, a brother, a friend, a mother,

sounding like an ache that can never be satisfied: how

could they say they’d never heard it, these men

knitting and knitting the same dream over?

Of course they heard the cry. It broke them in pieces.

And when they woke,

they slipped out of bed, gathered their lights,

and rushed into the dark to seize it.

The Cry

The Cry

A man can cry, all night, your back

shaking against me as your mother

sleeps, hooked to the drip

to clear her kidneys from their muck