Chapters (85)

punched windless/ sometimes he simply/ beat the crap

out of you/ and it became/ sex?/ I’m asking you/ what you

make of that/ kind of/ penetration/ how it makes/ all the

other kinds/ less simple/ or was it ever/ simple/ even when

you are alone/ in the dark/ and you come/ just thinking of

your blood/ on his hand/

TEMPERANCE

The blackness.

Side by side.

Hunger pains and then

nothing. The still hours,

when love sets like crystal,

heart hard with it.

Some swollen cloud.

Windless sky.

Your leg across mine,

keeping me lame. No reason to move again,

not even to reach for the cup,

its smooth skin of poison.

That cloud, suddenly vanished.

The beetles with their tiny jaws,

eating the last of our backs.

PRIESTESS

Your mistress strutted about the Sunday market with a

green string bag and espadrilles, as old as my mother but

sleeker, bare arms like marble, breasts as high and full as

the baskets before her. I stood at a table of potatoes and

thrust my hand into the parsley and thought very hard

about how often you went to bed with her, how often with

me, how good you were at minutes, putting them in their

proper slots. It was spring and I had a pair of sunglasses

on and the same filthy jacket I’d worn all winter the sun

was crawling over the backs of my hands I could hear those

espadrilles grinding into the gravel how I wanted to tell

her Look. Just two weeks more would it kill you to give

them to me I won’t ever come back. She was filling that

bag up just pointing to everything and it was given to her

and she laughed and I crumpled an onion skin in my fist

she didn’t have the sense to look my way, to see how much

more beautiful I was and so I looked at the man selling the

potatoes and said too loud How much? He pointed to a sign.

The onion skin dissolved. My bag was empty. She turned

and our eyes met across the throng and we waved.

TECHNICAL TERM FOR HEARTBREAK

Fall was my first season and my last. I didn’t like the way the

leaves got wet in the rain and stuck to my boots made me

slip long scrape on my hip bruised all around. A thin calm

spread through me; I think that’s how you know you’re going

to lose your mind.

There was one night you came, a night that would turn into a

morning and then an afternoon, sixteen or seventeen hours,

a miracle, and yet mostly what we did was sleep. We arose no

rush in the morning brushing our teeth before kissing and

later I thought, what incomprehensible stupidity, waste, I

wept over it, I hit my head with my fist, why? Why did I?