How easily I teased these pins from her
robes once. Coaxing each one out with my mouth,
my lips heating her metal, I unraveled

He names the taste that lingers on their tongues
regret, and the word falls to the earth between them,

1. A mother’s lifelong rage. The slow burn
of a wire behind an old house wall, its paper
ornamental to the last, going

Eugene would say, "Someone died . Time to redecorate."
Everything we owned was secondhand.
We needed to move. We were running out of space.

Neck pulled back. Wrists tied. Weight pops
shoulder from socket. All disjunction.
So many Judgment Days. Hell absorbs us

After the curistes are all evacuated, from my balcony.
I watch the hotel next door bum down.

Water. Man. The fire burns all night.

This is the beginning .
Almost anything can happen.

I think I know what he would say
about the dream I had last night
in which my nose was lopped off in a sword fight,

It’s a story as famous as the three little pigs:
one evening a man says he is going out for cigarettes,
closes the door behind him and is never heard from again,

I wish my head to appear perfectly round 
and since the canvas should be of epic dimensions, 
please trace the circle with a frisbee,