you scooped mouth, scraped tusk until it forgot its elephant, sanded a girl who'd never be allowed to swallow. atop your rafters
i peel an orange, sticky with pity. nothing refusing rot can love. but you try until you crack, shivering against her ivory hips. silence grows claws. nothing in this room is dying but you. so you shake
out your best tunic, kiss your reflection, the only life in her gaze, and cross the wet fact of women laughing in the street outside my temple. you step
over the bull opening its throat on my marble floors, gagging on coppery air. you kneel, a loose shaving at my altar, shame yourself asking, _give me one just like my statue._
i watch the blood creep in rivulets toward your alabaster hands, and i laugh flame into my candles.
you want a woman? take the slaughterhouse. no magic. just fever. blue fuses sewn to bone, a pandemic of cells, billions of tiny deaths. a human is nothing more than a host; grace, a lung laboring beneath stone. look
at you. petrified. dusting off her eyelids—terrifying, your gentleness: a boy cleaning a gun while it fires. idiot, you can't have a lover without the meat; her body
is just a machine morphing milk to bile, yeast to bone. so try, if you fucking must, to kiss her, but she's not a mirror anymore, pygmalion. she's a mouth sour with morning breath.
look at her now without recoiling. she's sweating on your silk. she's scratching her skin to flakes. she's laughing at her stench, and she's full, to the brim, with teeth.
isn't she the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?