The Beastangel
After Robert Hayden’s “Bone-Flower Elegy”
In the dream I enter him
I the eater of numbers
the black-lipped barcode
of cost have come for him
because he owes me. He
owes me the broken machine
the bone structure gone limp
over leg of time. I irreverent
as safe sex breathlessly
whispering this is not a threat
but a promise for the love of
the wolf on lockdown. Why
the long face? the horsefly
asked the muzzle as though to
suggest these mouths we
have are traps, bold-faced lairs
of brotherhood. Cover your eyes
and you’ll miss it, you’ll miss this
squalid city growing legs from its
scalp. His kneecaps jerked beneath
the sheet, skinned eyelids rolling back
to the / Point to where he touched
you on the doll, he asked.
¿cómo se dice “everywhere”?
He will pay for this, the heroic
antihero announced, the vulture-
masked man surveying the damage
the clinical centaur now spooked
his hind legs reared as if to say
demons fear beasts in twos.
Rage bound tight in synthetic
skin / bound and ridden in dialect
at an angle of consumption. After
feeding he asks, What’s the damage?
The legless caterpillar humping itself
forward / toward my mouth, rending
the lip a cleft palate, twisted up from
firegold sand, a habit of creature
malformed. The men laid flowers
on my mother’s tongue, they come
see about me. These flowers are edible
men / flowers of sawtooth bone.