She was edged sometimes in allure
and sometimes in revenge.  Tulle
or orchids. The hole
from her boot heel sunk on the basement
door welled like a heart
or a far train.  

We'd part-expected her since the swing set
when the chain links twisted
into crackling, failing
to contain us, our rotations.

Behind her, a half-sack
of pilfered apples, which looked to us
delightful and anarchic. 

She swept the top drawers and rattled our own baby
teeth before us like a damp mirror.
She tore layers from our toe skin
and extracted the tiniest of blue, strangled feet.
She traced every bone and nodule, our bellies
pressed to a kind of laminate sky.

Our cuticles
sweetened with blood and she
washed them and kissed them like hair
in a copper basin.  She fed us
and called us reality, surprise and condition.  

Called us and we arrived and arrived.  

We were almost asleep for the emancipation.  She was
gone, in a trail of brambles.
And for all aesthetic measurements, the wishes
made on horseshoes thrown over shoulders as the candles
roared out, she was a wooden spoke,
the cheek of a medallion, the padding of a couple
in another room.  We pined for her return.  

We filled the offertory with signals. What could have been
more terrible than the flocks that homed
on the lawn, straddled the roof, and buckled the gutters—
they moaned like cold engines, their necks
peeled open in horrible song.