This is for mariamaria, for no particular reason other than the fact that I'm glad to be reading some of her new stuff again. It's amazing, the things we miss sometimes.

---

Deal with your cracked soul,
Its marks staining your clothes:

Starved,
carved in with metal tweezers
you were never quite
the cave-dweller,
but for the sake of fire,

"I'm really not diseased",
you say, with your alabaster eyebrows
coming down on the world of your view

the tricksters left your apartment long ago,
stealing your
pineapple vodka with their right hands
why are you still wearing that aqua mini, why
are you still smiling when there's so much

rain coming down through the ceiling

nothing's the same, is it.
and you shrug, a dried cactus too prickly
to touch with bare hands,

this is too heavy for the world, you almost say,
mouthing through your prissed-up pucker,
holding your vowels close,
leaving the words behind to rot like cockroach carcasses,
to fade like old photographs,
already ancient.