FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC

I predicted you would miss my scent
so you wore my clothes to bed for a week
and left me naked on the West Side
while you haunted my closet,
let the moths eat my fur coats
and hung flowers in the attic.
I turned into a statue
and men threw money at my feet.
You collected the bills - fifties & hundreds -
& made the fortune you always wanted.

TIN CAN BLOOD

Puritanical for so long I have forgotten
how to open tin cans, how difficult to control
the liquid out the top, how the Albacor spills everywhere
how easy it is to tear flesh.

And wasn't there some urban myth about tin cans & tetanus?

Metal poisoning - what a boring way to die in New York.

Darling, I don't want you to hear that kind of report on the 6 o'clock news.
The guilt would kill you. What finality.

But I am spilling out blood.
I am spilling out my blood to feed the land in forgotten
tribal rituals for citified madness…

When I left you I swore I would need the strength,
which makes these kinds of cuts much more tragic.

EATING THE YOUNG

Sustenance. Punishment.
At a museum lecture, the statue of Ugolino from Dante's Inferno
sweating beads of marble, surrounded by sons
in various stages of age 4 - 14.
Condemned by angry gods to eat his young, and they go
willingly…the dark myths no one wants to talk about.

A college professor with a brain so bounteous
it made his plain face handsome,
telling of Medea, who ate her children in revenge
against the husband. "You should write about that myth, Andrea,"
he said to me on the eve of his wife's childbearing,
and I would have run away with him in that second if he'd asked me
as I wondered at procreation's martyrs -
who devours whom, as embryos steal
their mother's fingernails, as parents feed off their young
in eternal sacrifices of love & redemption.