of coat hangers tangled up in orgy,
wet snarls of wire twisting unto rust,
every angle acute and closing, everything
elbows. Follow any line to ride a hook
that snags, a jagged machine-cut terminus.
Or sibilant intersection of mantises,
joints that scissor around and through,
serration and the wrong kind of hunger:
under glass, symmetrical cannibals
oblivious to the cracking of their chitin,
their dual roles as consumed and consumer.
So, too, I hear the hiss and clatter
of dripping sacks of sodden beaks and claws
still twitching, bearing false witness;
black gospel of happiness as if this were
right, rubbing threat with memory of
peck and scratch mechanics, but precise.
Legs like X’s. Scissor, yes: guillotine whisper
of blade on blade and closing on delusion,
their desperate friction of self-immolation,
bone against bone and praying for smoke
as shards push hard through puncture wounds.
They burn themselves / each other for fiction.
(first appeared in volume 1 of Constellations)