Of Someone Else Entirely

You have been burning

the cork of yourself. You crawl

the nightboards bare-assed, scratching

Negress against the grains, leaving fingernails

in invocation, dabbler, out out

your damn mind, summoning a phantom

the shape of my granny—that peerless apparition—

her halo of witch hazel and snuff,

her knuckles cracking the whip kept tucked

away in her attic like a hush of bastard fist.

You slip her on, hot to be hazed

dressed in a distinct leather’s stink.

The gaze of a husband who hates you less

bears down her living midriff, sniffs her

out as he would a bloom

of mold in your basement, its dank

souvenir. What blood ensues is the pink

in my palms and patter of rebel in my neck

when I, having slept wild again,

awake. About impossibility:

I am not unsympathetic. I get it.

He beasts you and you feel a need to pass

the buck. In my house, we call this

nothing much after all. When Freud

observed Verschiebung, he wasn’t looking at us,

how we assault the air with grudges

avoiding talk of our learned tortures.

I will not flash you the rattling quarters

of evening my mothers crowd inside

to seek their penny-wide retreats;

I’m going to unfatten your pockets.

Remind me again of your ghost ration.

What if you could eat your fill?

Have you? Haven’t you had enough?

What would you do, do, do without us?

In the poem I’d conjure to carry me

across the finale of my animal life

I can ride no skin but this one.

Sweat stifles its cells until they fungify.

The night choir-sways down my throat’s red aisle.

My muscles flaccid in felt ventriloquism.

The vessels sing a sequence of chains.

They chew through my confessional face.

My mouth lopsided as a fainting chaise,

My mouth clack-clicks back to work my teeth

Latchbolt into a snigger:     tight     bright     luxe

enuff sighs the blue smoke the grin

cuts out of my bottom lip enuff