Her neighbor is hungry, shaking
drawers for a blade.
His gums are tender
worms in wet spring. She hooks
her fingers into ornaments
to hang on his jaws.
Her grandmother’s wisdom
was to feed
umbilical things, to nourish
as roots ripped to lace
in her hands. He comes
where the shriveled heads
of bouquets drowse on the table,
where no man will come
to the door with an ax. An ax
is a woman’s fiction,
a lust for bones cracked loose,
lungs sucking steam
from entrails. An ax would open him
like a cupboard, like a romance
novel. He would open
like an unhealed sore
and pool, like his coat
brought in from the snow.
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