My tongue is bruised, lash-licked.

The words I've been swallowing.

My needle broke while sewing the splits in my feet. The eye dangled by my thread.

I spotted bad blood between my legs; varicose trails leading from the source to pools between my toes.

It was the kind of conversation that killed time. It was the kind of conversation that killed itself and we forced resuscitating words. She said I'm a nice person to talk to, and it was good talking to me.

I never got her name.

10/10

The blackbird, the sparrow
perch beakless on sinking wires,
bobbing in the wind, in the wake.
Sparking steel dragging through the street
—not the best metal, like fingernails
flaking, chipping. Mine belong to the days
when tires froze to the streets
and the sky never caught fire—
this drum never caught—
and Lucy,
you end me.

9/10

This infant flesh
is not my flesh. Nor is this red ink—
soaked sack drying burlap. A red splotch blooms over;
incendiary match
peels fiber from porous fiber
in a drum sprayed with graffiti argot.
A neutral void now,
and perhaps I am sitting too close—
tiny toes crack and pop
in vacuous silence,
like my voice crumbling from my mouth.

8/10

A postcard,
desperate language smeared in haste,
scripts itself under the guise
of an expert marksman.
Adulterated by beaks, perhaps;
peck-holes infiltrate context,
and it is indiscernible, sir
—like scissors that snipped lamentable faces.
Scrawled from a shaky hand,
stiff and out of tune.
Slip it into the dusty voice box
with a post script—post haste.