Colleen Abel

Self Portrait as Jaw X-Ray

The infection’s mottled dark
inside the bone
like the composition notebook’s
marbled cover, your name

written neatly on the front
in your best script.
And all the things inside
are best kept: the words

that will spread and spread
until you are sick with them.
To go back and tell
the girl you were to hide

her tongue behind her
milky teeth--
silence is that health-white there,
arresting shadows.

---

Caryatid With Arm Blocking Entry to the Tomb

You envy, mistakenly,

my endurance. I have nothing

you do not also have:

the stone-cancer

of efflorescence, the decay,

the city’s sulphurous lechery.

But you, who, like death-masons

make poetry of your own unbecoming,

I envy you. You know pity,

at least, and the dignity

of solitude and hands

that mean to soothe and not

erode you.

---

Devolution

From this throne, thorny with velvet
I crawled on all fours down.

I took the brain-crown
ringed with slimy jewels

from the unhinged skull.
Scraped rough my knuckles

by dragging on asphalt,
slurred to blurred

my speech. Last,
I divested a watch, my rings.

The useless human things.