When the zero in the parking lot
is the grocer tossing
human hands into the dumpster
Vera touches lit
candles to her throat but instead of birds
Nonny appears
drops a pig at Vera’s feet
slinks off into the cave Gilded
Squalor where Vera finds her days
later rumming by the fire
Acts ensue deliberate and fierce
In the morning
the grocer arrives with a crazed
look on his face
Beside him his son is choking on a bone
Vera massages the candles
over his throat, clearing it
The grocer flees
as Nonny acts on the boy
his gorgeous youth, and so it goes
Suke or Sacha, it mattered once
the arbor life turned
inside out by holy dolls
holy moths
flickering windows at the Adlon
Hotel where the day’s
shape does not match
Vera’s particular arrangement
of candles greeting hoppers
pushing stainless
trolleys filled with bowls
of pork, concealer to hide the scars
that mark the skin a rib came through
sugar orbs and other
charms she stuffs in her mouth
till the choking cough
reveals the human warmth it takes
to exchange amber for injury
incurred when citrus
is less in the room than her
and the two halves of the halved
pig flanking
her shoulders like wings, white disease
blossoming in her cheeks
like daisies erupting in reverse
tight knobs she lacerates to ease
the strain, arms thrashing
involuntarily against
the difficulty of choosing what to bless
as if conditions could be
changed if only impulse could
keep her safe from carnation
skin events, dark fruits
throats cannot reject