Bird Eating Bird Read Online Free Page A

porcelain like heat ringing the radiator’s gut.
     
    She tries to turn it off, but the knob won’t budge, the joint sparkled with a mossy-blue patina.
     
    Outside, a shooting star etches a blue groove into the tune of the sky.
     
    The gasses through the heating valves clanging through the traps.
     
    Once, she waited for a set of hips to heat the cushions, next to hers. Now, she smolders there. Now, swells.
     
    On the clock-face, one hand laps around the dial while the other quivers still.
     
    A cool, white pill on the counter for when her heart bells.
     
    Beneath the blue blue sky. Beneath the vapor hoisting itself up into clouds, and spilling over, dousing the landscape like a smoothing detergent. Beneath the cool, diluted heavens beneath the stars. Beneath the random course of a satellite eeking photos out of light, shearing the distance that’s a patch of skin.

REAR WINDOW
    We talk on the phone.
    My foot in a cast in Heather Green’s window.
    A single mole climbs the eye of the big toenail.
    A toenail that is porous and slick as cornea.
    At night while I sleep, the mole slowly creeps
    away from me, from the big toe’s lunula.
    This morning, the sky is wide and translucent.
    It is as blue as porcelain as a bathroom sink.
    We talk on the phone. Heather Green has packed her things,
    dragged them to Adam’s and left me this window.
    Heather Green: her name is a cortex of modification,
    a plural green followed by a veritable one.
    When she leaves, I miss her intensity.
    So, I sit with my foot in a cast in her window and smoke.
    The window is a movie screen I compose before me.
    In the proximal foreground, yes, the windowsill, the smoke.
    Toes poke out of a cast set on the sill tipsy as a gift-shop Devil’s Ivy.
    Behind the cast sits two trees, a street, parked cars,
    a grade-school building made of brick and windowpanes.
    One of the trees accumulates leaves
    while the other loses them to an April frost.
    We talk on the phone.
    In an instant, the leaves have grown old
    and their leaf veins pierce their own fragile skin,
    tips of those veins now shriveled and thorny.
    As he fades the old man watches his fingernails
    grow backwards into his hands.
    When he scratches he closes his eyes.
    The horror of his horns topples the buck.
    A bird bathes in dust to wash off the bugs.
    We talk on the phone.
    The green leaves against the sky were liquid yesterday.
    I said, Yesterday, they were a suspension but still liquid, staving off grief.
    Today, the curds pulled back from the whey.
    We talk on the phone and just like the film,
    the leaves die right before my very own eyes.
    A blonde is sent to investigate.
    My toes curl when the Plains wind casts dust
    through the rungs of the empty tree.
    Wind, the likely murderess, her blue glances distressing every branch.
    Whenever we talk I remember you sat in Heather Green’s window
    the days before I could stagger from bed.
    I went to crutches, one leg, and stuttered before you.
    The hammer of a metronome shuddering at one end.
    Nights, you cast my leg in plastic bags and used a bowl to bathe me.
    I watched light peal from the porcelain.
    Dust spangled my reflection you bent with a fist
    you made wringing the soap from the foamy washcloth.
    Before there was a need for me to talk, for me to even ask,
    there was the smoking afterwards of your hands.
    There was a wind, there was dust,
    and there was the window you had already shut.
    There was sweat you drowned in the milky tub.
    There was hunger, eggshells hulled-out on the sill.
    I ate when you said I was hungry.
    I drank because you held a glass up to my lips.
    I slept because you lay down beside me.
    I dreamt because you were gorgeous and I was dreamy, you said.
    I cried because there was ache, and because of you
    on the phone there is so much more of the gorgeous ache.
    In the mornings, you dressed and redressed, knotting
    the silky curtains in the windows when you finished.
    When we kissed, brick-ends of the tenement started to