I’m afraid of being nothing but a few old bones.

If I think of my name, then maybe you’ll hear it.

If I think of my name then maybe you’ll hear.

Grass blade. Crow eye. Crushed berry. Worm in the dirt.

In science we had a life-sized skeleton.

It hung in the classroom all year long.

It hung by the blackboard, all alone. . . .

Sacrum, parietal, metacarpal bone.

I failed the test, got too many answers wrong.

Once I asked my mother if God was all over.

I asked if He saw us. I had a high fever—

She said she didn’t know, and straightened my covers.

Then she kissed my face; then she kissed my hair.

(Then he tore my pajamas and my legs were bare.)

If you’re still looking for me, you won’t find me anywhere.

Human Nature

HUMAN NATURE

When I hear of how he kept one girl alive

after disposing of the friend and mother,

and about the next one he found

and killed and cut apart,

I try to imagine him hooking his fingers

through the plastic rings of a six-pack,

lifting a nozzle from its cradle

to gas up a truck, flicking

the dead end of a cigarette into the weeds,

and I don’t want him to be human—

shaking water from a comb,

jiggling the handle of a toilet, fishing

for a quarter to drop into the slot

of a meter. I want him tentacled

and eyeless, like some

creature from a star so far away

it’s not charted anywhere, its light

stopping short of earth.

I want him to be a shapeless

lump of matter that is not

our matter, not carbon-based,

maybe I don’t even want him

to be alive—silicon, circuitry,

inert mass of material. Then

he’d be no more capable of evil

than a rock or stick—rock brought down

hard on a skull, stick whittled

to a fine point and tipped with poison—

there still would be someone,

a god to work the levers, to set him

in motion. Better not to think

of a god like that, better to believe

there’s nothing; nothing, and the human.

FOUR

FOUR

Lush Life

LUSH LIFE

In this bottle a searing headache,

in that one a car angling off the road

to meet a tree in your neighbor’s yard,

in the next one a man who removes

your clothes while you spin

down into the whirlpool of the bed’s black sheets.

At the bottom of another: locked metal box

you can’t pry open, though you can hear

someone in there, muttering and crying

and saying how sorry she is.

And don’t forget the worm of shame

that uncurls in your throat sometimes,

and the bathrooms where you crouched

shaking before a toilet, your hair limp,

the sour evening rising up inside you.

So what are you doing, sitting there

holding a half-full highball glass,