Gloves first, I thicken my skin, plastic
snaps sin-smooth on my wrists, shower comebacks
beached on my teeth like whales, stomach up and screaming.
Scalpel sharp enough to shear away that hint
of a unibrow, bring it down, tap a rhythm on the blue-bleach
tablecloth. Meat still glinting around the eye,
like I clawed it out myself with tissue still
frothing under my nails. Cut it away, all those extra details,
get on the doctor’s scale backward
so I don’t have to name the number. Peel up the iris
like a sticker and slice the cornea into tangerines,
the ones I fed her when her sickness
was broth-boned. As her hands hang limp
and she chews with molars exposed, I drain the vitreous fluid
and toss it in the trash, down beside the way my stomach pouts
in a tight tank top and her face when she calls me
one of those goddamn queers.
Tight-laced, that’s the word for her.
The crystalline lens, the stone strung at the center of the eye.
The lens of her, she says she wanted to be a Las Vegas
painted woman, dance like a lightning bug
and shake her blue breasts. I can imagine her around a bonfire,
moving her feathered hips for men
instead of ghosts, accompanied by a wordless roar
from the crowds hiding in the shadows.
She says I’d disgust any man with my body.
The lens has the homemade applesauce from the withered apples
that collect on her old trees, the midnight phone line
ringing across her loneliness, the intricate braids she
leaves laid across my scalp like a crown.
I’ve picked the eye to pieces, scanned
and screened, it’s splayed out for me.
Lightsick, she’s fading, she’s juicing tangerines, writing her will,
hands to the sky and spine tree-twisted toward the ground.
She’s opened up like a tangerine
and maybe one day I can forgive her.
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