part the second. in which we meet the boy and girl

There was a girl who unmade her mother
who picked out the stitches of her silences
till the stuffing showed, the doll’s glass eye
glistening, the devil’s radio in her ears .

The skinless-poison mother rose,
spitting condemnation and doctored photographs
of misremembered history, decanted children
her milkless plastic teat left behind like an afterthought
in a giftwrapped box , her voice of hot dust .

Love this motherless girl,
Her milk-on-ice, her sugared cakes
Her belly-oven and babies, with tiny hands.

There was a boy who did not know how to be a boy
Whose father spoke of machines,
And a toothed-wheel world unwinding
While he kept a wringer-washer
filled with gasoline and secrets.

The greaseblack father rose and left his mark
a stain on crumbling walls and babyskins
the empty-endings speech stuttering in the boy’s head
till he wrapped himself in rags and leather
and stumbled through the world a deadwalking thing
creaking and electric and waiting for a storm.

There is a story of how they found one another,
dead boy and oven-bellied girl
his matchbook of confessions, her sweetly frosted heart
and what he did to it. I can not tell it here

say something green curled out of his bony sockets
say she warmed the greasy lump in his rusted chest
save horrors for another day