Nance Van Winckel

People, don't ask me again where my shoes are. The valley I walked through was frozen to me as I was to it. My heavy hide, my zinc talisman—I'm fine, people. Don't stare at my feet. And don't flash the sign of the cross in my face. I carry the Blue Cross Card— card among cards, card of my number and gold seal. So shall ye know I am of the system, in the beast's belly and up to here, people, with your pity. People, what is wrong with you? I don't care what the sign on your door says. I will go to another door. I will knock and rattle and if you won't, then surely someone, somewhere, will put a pancake in my hand. You people of the rhetorical huh? You lords and ladies of the blooming stump, I bend over you, taste you, keep an eye on you, dream for you the beginning of what you may one day dream an end to. The new century peeled me bone-bare like a first song inside a warbler—that bird, people, who knows not to go where the sky's stopped. Keep this in mind. Do you think the fox won't find your nest? That the egg of you will endure the famine? You, you people born of moons with no mother-planets, you who are back-lit, who have no fathers in heaven, hear now the bruise-knuckled knock of me. I am returned. From your alley. From your car up on blocks. From the battered, graffitied railcars that uncouple and move out into the studded green lightning. Dare you trust any longer the chained-up dogs of hell not to bust free? Or that because your youth's been ransacked, nothing more will be asked of you? If a bloody foot's dragged across your coiffed lawn— do not confuse me with dawn. Now people, about the shoes: the shoes have no doubt entered the sea and are by now walking the ramparts of Atlantis. I may be a false prophet, but god bless me, at least I have something to say. I lay myself down in a pencil of night—no chiseled tip yet, but the marks already forming in the lead.

Foreplay of obscene graffiti carved into trees—foot-long boners gouge the bark. Beaks and snouts on a restroom mirror. Slick lips. Succulent lips. I go out among them sometimes. So sweet how they pucker up out of pity. A practiced pathos in a saloon of woodsmen whose axes wait in trucks out back. Lips full of yawn or yes. Lips thick with God-spit and God-suck. Chapped lips, bloody lips. Pierced or tattooed, they pout into view—here to give, willy-nilly, what's been too long held in the body. Something passes across tongues. It sayeth not a name; it taketh everyone's turn. Mute lips of a swift unbuttoner. Mouths fording frothy streams, vaporous bogs. I stumble forth in their midst. Maybe I am out of bread or in a bad place with a book. The streets have an attendant caress. Moon lapping rumor. Fat lip approaches hare lip. There go pasty lips. All are readied as if for a race or to be plucked like rare moths by bright wings from the air. Betty's lips and Bobby's and Bucky's just before the collision and the siren's red wail. Laddy, keep a light on. I may have to come ashore some distance from where I set in.

The rat traps emptied, the grain troughs filled. The distance between sheep shed and my own ice-melt dripping on the mat equals the diameter of moonlight squared on his face as he looks up and finds me again. Says he’s sure I’d been swallowed by the elements, says he’d been about to come looking. I step into the warm. Two baas from out back where I’d worked. Two tufts of wool he lifts from my hair. In just such a manner are sleek blue words slyly acquired by a wispy whiter-than-snow page. He’s seen it happen. Seen a tear of mine, then two, well up and slip loose as the little boat of orgasm veers into the vortex.

How can it not be about engine, secret blaze behind the wheels? How not about this no-way-to-resist seeing but one side or another since the rails quite insist & iron's so right, always running off its own might. How never about freightage or the outdoor face in the indoor light? A yesteryear's pall over the day at hand? Not about the passings-by of nailed-shut houses & grouse setting sail from a rusty swing? How not me out of uniform, out of a sleeper's berth, bare & barely rising atop smoke & so little air left in the soft underbelly that I may meet—nay, embrace— the hello-goodbye cloud.