Featuring Tonight at the Street Hustler’s Circus: The Girls

The streets ram themselves into coochies:

sodden women with bamboo for backs

& taffy for sex. Both sweet & sour.

Star-cloaked women who don’t bend

or break. Who catch Hondas right in they grills.

Women with electric-pink hoofs that drag

in the slow churn of the intersection. Clog

the sidewalks. Metastasize along the corridor

of Main Street. They have come to settle

around the bend of this corner. Pose

under carnival-like car lights at just nine-thirty.

Note: It ain’t even prime time & they got all that

good-good going on sale. The gully accordion,

their arms sway in & out of tempo with traffic.

They stagger in & out of the busted frame of Pop’s

Grocery neon-blue open sign. Their smoke-thin throats

glitter when they slip into the ringing center of the motel lobby.

Strangled light bubbles & soaps along their jaws like melted crayons

through the Plexiglas. A rush of shade strains

against their nylon-clamped thighs, rides up their hips

& dangles around their soft bellies as they saunter on in.

They be harvested sounds for the replay later this evening.

When they got to make it do what it do. When they got to

cash they own checks. Trace dollar signs into ceilings — signals

cut with their zirconia-encrusted toes.

Giggle & grunt at all the right moments

for the Best in Show.