Giant
He sees beauty in broken glass,
a cracked sliver of her face on the floor,
orange Halloween make-up on a purple bruise.
Her leg is his candescent canvas,
his hungry map of bottle and bed,
a disheveled path of brandy and gin
candy for his aching cavity.
His mouth caves in for drowning,
downing shot, shot, shot non-stop
hook swallowed through the throat.
Tearing walls apart, he tears the telephone
out. As if he won his breath, his lips curl
as he sings she breaks just like
a little girl, and laughs the way
her apology strangles. Lost in nest rubble,
she scrambles under the table.
Pot shards and seeds spatter the wall.
He thinks: she
needs him to screw the fisted screen out,
needs him to lay the torn phone line,
needs him to find her fucking keys
he chucked in the bush.
He counts the ways her guilty faith rips
and how only he fits her pieces.
He thinks he makes her strong.
He can't sleep the dawn. Why should she.
Blue dew gathers grass. He faults her for this,
for the draining October leaves, the snaking draft.
The tacked-up moon reflects true
in his bedside glass--so he guzzles it.
His lover's lips move colorless,
foreign as a silent flick,
a spot lit sparrow,
frail, frail, frail to a giant's thirst.
He can't get back to where rum is just
rum and not his mother's name
or a shattered flame's old flickering sin
sticking synonym to his lover's brow
familiar somehow to Magdalene or Joan,
a faithless saint lost long ago
with his milk change, first guitar, only song
his mother sold downstairs at the bar
for cigarettes and a cold Manhattan.
And he says, he loves
broken women cuz they fit
in his cheek, leave little meat in the teeth,
taste like cheap wine and lipstick, hot
chestnuts on the street and remind him
of New York's flesh strapped giant-sized
to buildings-- seven stories high
those perfect thighs just might
provide skin enough to warm his frozen blood.
-Laura E. J. Moran, Live Bait, 2005