Sweetlips and Spangled Emperors

We lost the change that looking
makes: less juice in the sluice,
more tear in the where. Severed

boy-twin sits up, keeps going, offers
a sacrifice to news crews—
the dirt, the down, the dormant star.

We carved an elegy into a chunk
of soap, spelled another
with bodies on a hillside

until the usual twits came to warm
a hole in our iced-up lake, leaving
us hobbled and cheated of tongue,

where pain yet peaks under orchidy rain.
Quelles jolies, parentheses—we slow,
go slack as the water within.

Copyright © 2009 Mark Bibbins All rights reserved
from The Dance of No Hard Feelings
Copper Canyon Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission