HER, FOR INSTANCE

Her body now an overpeppered stew:
so much raunch through the years, leaving flesh

tallowy and slack. The bruised fruit
of her bony thighs and hips, rebar

fingering the too-ripe cantilever
of her breasts. Skin a kind of coarse

deadwood, cells dropping off in a blue fog
of cigarette smoke and backbeat memories.

On this corner, neon liquor and rough
trade coursing the streets in late-model

sedans, saying: taste this touch. She stands
with the other restored wrecks, giving it

the old lip lick, eyebrow raise, the old flash
and bend. Such a cult of quotation, groinish

euphuism, embroidering the cul-de-sac sentence
of the day. And this day following the others

with all the vivid piety of ritual and obloquy.
One obstreperous penis after another. A postcard

home to her son. A bottle of Jolt to offload
the taste. Spring blossoms floating above buses

on Bush Street, adding nature’s saturnine slap
in the face to the parade of the indented.