Anna Maria Hong

to challenge sleep to go against the one-eyed god of  victimhood: Polyphemus by way of  Redon rising, open eye ripe with stupid gazing. How dare you look at me? plural tense: now and then, to bed and back again and one more war. The oral rinse of moral sense can lift the fence of expectation, expand the dome of  tolerance. I, too, arose from the unthinkable, used to Nobody responding loud as circumstance.

Purveyor of  rot and whatnot, entrepreneur of  I forgot, with wrists hard as hammers — that birthmark a slot — grip it, strip it, flip it hard — ramp my shard. If  fear be sexy, a synch & a match — Gone the way of  wax & worms — gone like November 2011 — sweet by nature, mean by culture — “Goodbye, luck, you idiot,” said the Fox to the Grapes. “I love you,” replied the Grapes.

To push and push with raw pink claws like hands of shin. To tunnel my love through wet earth, wet stars — no one needs the underneath like me. I give you permission to grip me. To patrol the worm-drench of my thinking. To bite a worm’s head and cure the rest as cache. Your flesh, my flesh, your dead as dead, buried like a feeling. To push through that wet, a scrum of worms whittling my skin like a premonition. To have pushed mountains into hills, ragged sooth from the slid wall of healing. “Nothing,” said the suicide, “is as sad as recovery.” To work myself forward like a noun or an entry.