A Tender Age

in this corner, a dog is screaming

he is calling your name
Oliver, Oliver

you have better things to do

you in your urchin shirt
rusty shoes, hat full
of night and spiders

you sneak the hubcaps
off dead men’s eyes

you borrow morning
ransom it for some
chilled red soup

you tuck bracelets, brooches,
feathered hat pins in your pockets

they clank an odd song when you run
they rub together like bones in your thin
shoulder joint

no meat
no meat
for the strangers’ mouths

for the dog still barking

for the profiles made of metal and gems

when the street lights pop on
so many bad ideas over so many
dusty, perfumed heads

you are just getting started
your business hawking pocket watches
stealing time
and other boys’ tender teeth

The Painted Wooden Leg

outside Eureka in a cheap corral with a fifteen-foot chain 
link fence   a retired insurance salesman raises tigers     

he lets Cindy rub her cheeks in the eggy fur of the cubs' 
bellies   feed them milk and soaked toast from her defenseless 

thumb    the girl holds a cub outside the tigers' cage 
the mother's paw (smell of a garbage scow) can only reach 

so far through the wires    the dumb cub   its mother   chirp 
like broken machines   their faces   smeared with petroleum
 
jelly   glow with a dull dirty sheen   Cindy wipes and wipes 
at tiny eyes    at 2am   her father fighting dream claws 

in the damp bedroom    Cindy scales the fence    balances 
on top     her small slipping sneakers squeak   the tigers 

circle underneath    yawn    stretch    fall   collapse 
in heaps     scratch their spines against the meaty straw
   
their tender white bellies call   inviting    

Frankenstein’s Bride

he is in me     
they are in me    
hands      machines

copper wire threads up my uterus

  they peel back the dermis
 peel back the fascia      the muscle    staple the layers
   under my breasts to hold them in place

my grandfather’s tractor drags rotating disks   
   plows my liver     my bladder
 
   they shoot rays into me     
   they picture my bones    irradiate my blood

 myself on the screens above    
 white hieroglyphs on blue paper
     I shudder in pixels         

I am shorn    the razors are my warm metal friends   
my legs
my cunt      my upper lip

  they raise my ovaries with chopsticks   
  white as sleeping faces     they carve smiles into
       slick pale viscera     

   two thousand 
dead fireflies electrified             they blow on my womb
foul rat breath       try to start a fire   

   they have lost something here   
they will find him               the intern has disappeared   
sculptors of blood and bile and circuits      they will carve him out of me

   under my tongue they sew a socket    
   AC/DC  flows down my collar bones  
       my vertebra  
 I cough a ghost’s name    
her name         they ask my husband to come in    
    and hold me down 

Rewrite of an earlier one. Probably can't recognize it.

the saber-toothed prison menu

rare wild spotted sharp cries scamper like spiders
blades of quivering dehydrated wild trunks
clots of rotting honey addicts
up to and including Dr. Geertzmantal
the Swedish botanist accidentally insists
the name comes from its paws
the Latin road, filled with wooden pitfalls and escapes,
endears it to the dust allergies and large plants’ fears
rumors, a hallucinatory poison, substantiate the fig-flavored tongue