One! Two! Your face is a cracked pot
You smile through pink gums
And the ground around is littered with little teeth
They pitter and pop like dancing feet
Some small sections of jaw
Look like they could reattach and start a song
Then your tongue unfolds like a scroll
And a coin drops to the concrete, it rolls
Jackpot, you win!
That long and pointed tongue
Flips and trembles outside of the mouth, it sings

Then you wheeze and whack!
The hinges of your face unlock
Dust escapes like steam from a machine
And then the spring winds up
And you burst into something new!
The rest of your gleaming flesh unfolds
Now the song slows down
The melody untunes
The step moves slower, much slower now
The shedding of the liquid beneath the skin
Spreads out on the concrete, it covers
That coin and those white teeth
Hush glug glug, this slow chug
Drowns out sound then exhales, ahh
The skin is empty now
The last note holds like a slow stream pooling
The dance is done, so hold that pose

Angels in rows crane their necks
to handle the weight.
They watch us move below.
Angels were never human
so they don’t understand
when a man speaks to a woman
and the woman looks away
because she is thinking in this life
there are so many things we don’t forgive
and when you grow tired
of the ways I entertain myself (you
are one of them) you will tire of me.

When angels see a wish for something,
someone’s eyes squeeze shut, bodies strain —
they hate it. Our hope,
our belief in flight,
in the promise of angels, or prayer,
we break their hearts.
And the angels, weighed down,
cannot lift their heavy heads to look away.

So let’s say that you lost your eye
playing Scrabble. It must have been
one hell of a game. Having not yet
surrendered to the advancing gray or
abandoned your razor to rust, you would
still not be handsome but perhaps
stronger, your eyes secure
and unremarkable.

You must have noticed, then, only sight —
perfect, seemingly independent
from the rods and cones, the lens and vitreous.
You would have scouted the board easily.
You would have picked sleep
from the corners of your eyes
to buy time. You would not have wondered
if an eyeball squashes like a grape.

I like you as a Scrabble player
more than as a soldier. Besides,
you look harmless enough, now,
with your black coffee and croissant, an old novel,
Conrad, resting open and stained, to your right.
Your opponent must have been petty,
the kind of man who talks through his teeth.

Maybe he had a mustache that curled up
at the ends like fishhooks that you wished
would just once cut through his cheek.
You imagined he would get by
without a tongue as you reached
into the black bag, passing over squares.
You’d write soldier into oxen
and caress a W like something illicit. Oxen
would lead into grenade, soldier
into nostril, nostril into swan.

I don’t know what weapon
your opponent used, or what,
provoked him — jealousy,
blood lust, pride, some arrangement
of events causing his blood
to move faster, his ribs to constrict, his breath
to catch — but I imagine he first threw
the board onto your lap and that your left eye
held on to the image of all those letters
tossed up and frozen in the air as though
hanging by an umbilical cord.

My question is this: How long
before your left eye surrendered to the pull
and became, simply, something other than itself —
no longer your left eye but
tissue, debris, shrapnel — and
could you hear the optic nerve snap?

I hear you lost your eye in The War, but
I hear other things too,
like that you used to tell people their futures, your
glass eye secretly a crystal ball, that
you’re a poet and that you were once
young and worked for the circus.

Between sips I imagine that young you and then
the you, now, getting up from your corner table.
You would tuck Conrad into your jacket
and ground yourself with your good eye,
calculating the contour of the sidewalk
while, in your glass eye, in the pocket
at the edge of sight, you would catch letters
sprouting wings or the road
blooming into rhododendrons or
the whole damn town exploding
into triple word scores.

smaller, a lost

balloon. He had heard

that when balloons fall

upon the ocean, whales

eat them and die.

He imagined ripples

breaking upon the water

like fireworks.

He watched her until

she disappeared,

and wondered whether

there were enough whales

to save all the balloons

that he had lost.

Tonight the ambassador will have us for drinks.
Tomorrow, that lady we’ve never met,
will say, “Oh you wouldn’t believe what dear Zelda said–
The funniest joke about an auto mechanic and the Prince of Wales…”
My collarbones pose like the jaw of a bluefish and that sweet way
I touch your arm when you laugh–
even the most sensible man, the one there in the gray suit,
will say, “You wouldn’t believe me
but they absolutely glowed.”

II. This Side of Paradise

You wouldn’t dare to leave but you did, you do.
The clock will stay up with me, as my ballet slippers reconcile
the melting ice cubes on the wooden floor.
You command the imaginary but
my beauty races storms.
Watch this gold-hatted lover dance!
I use your drafts to put out my cigarette,
searing the word splendor.
My dripping tumbler blurs the word money.

III. The Beautiful and Damned

The buzzing lily-cups—yellow and black
in my hair, now in my eyes.
The twitch of poisoning, a voice inside that I don’t recognize.
The hair ribbons hung from the vanity are shocked to silence —
my dear it’s just me, it’s just me!
A shriek drowns him,
then there are claws, then dark.

IV. Tender is the Night

I heard the nurses in their tissued suits and peppery shoes
turning the corners of this ward.
Like greedy hands to my breasts and deep breathing in my ear,
the waxy dripping of the wires, the hissing steam.
I can make a warm bed from these embers.
I try to hold a thought of you, but after eight years
the exact color of your eye alludes me.