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scream to whisper,
    blurring tempera clown leers.
    The damned thing squeals up, up,
    hugging the rickety matchstick track,
    ribboning the sheet of grease-scented dark.
    Up this insanely, the air boasts a simple pain,
    and I gulp breath as feverishly
    as the alligator girl scratches her skin
    to find a soft, definite history beneath.
    Watch me.
    Watch along with the limber,
    the slithering,
    the toothless,
    the doomed.
    Dance in gleeful anticipation
    of my plummet to the midway.
    Stand by until I have fallen.
    Let the freaks sniff out the parts they need.
    Then separate the splinters of wood
    from those of bone.

HER OTHER NAME
    for Girl X, Chicago
    The first thing we took away was your name.
    We erased the bleak shame from each syllable,
    blurred the image of your tiny body broken into
    network sound bytes, snippets of videotape
    with a swollen face x-ed out.
    x                  as in she is no longer a good girl.
    x                  as in two simple lines crossing
    where a beating heart should be.
    You were little, like we don’t want to remember.
    You were stutter-folded, you were beaten liquid
    on those lonely stairs, your skin was slashed,
    you were raped with a fist and sticks, insecticide
    sprayed into your seeing and down the tunnel of
    your throat. He must have held your mouth open,
    stretching the circle, leaving moons in your lip.
    The violation left you blind and without tongue,
    wrecked the new clock of you. You were jump rope
    in double time and pigeon-toed, navy blue Keds
    with round toes and soles like paper, jelly sandwiches
    and grape smash fingers, you, ashy-kneed rose,
    missing rib, splintered and flinching through
    a death sleep. In which direction do we pray?
    To recreate you, they relied on ritual.
    Weeping nurses gently parted your hair, the teeth
    of the comb tipped in rubber, and dried blood
    showered from your scalp like chips of paint.
    They rubbed warm oil through the unraveling braids,
    threaded ribbon through to the ends.
    We will give you back your life
    by pretending you are still alive.
    Lowering your x into a tub of warm water, they
    scrubbed you with stinging soap, sang songs filled
    with light and lyric, then dabbed you dry with those
    brutal sickbed towels, avoiding the left nipple,
    smashed before it began. Wrapping you in the stiff garb
    of virgins, they told you that you were healed,
    there in that stark room of beeping machines
    and blood vials and sterilized silver, they built
    you a child’s body and coaxed your battered heart back inside.
    Girl
    x. The violation left. x
    you blind and x voiceless
    And they braided your hair every day, gently,
    the ritual insane, strands over, under, through, over,
    under, through, fingers locked in languid weave,
    until the same of it all brought your voice back.
    The nurses cheered, told you they’d found a cure
    for history, that the unreal would refuse to be real.
    Soon you’ll be able to see again, they whispered.
    I know you never meant to be ungrateful, my rib,
    when you rose up half and growled this grace:
    that’s
    that’s
    O.K. you
    can keep
    my
    eyes

FORGOTTEN IN ALL THIS
    In the scarred fresco Joseph
    is the outline, eluding.
    Under close eye, the rotted color
    may reveal a beard,
    a muted and battered halo,
    one sullen eye cast toward
    the wrapped and luminous swaddle
    that became the world,
    damning what the world was before.
    His wife, earth hips in flawed marble
    or thick tempera, is spoiled and yes,
    blessed silly, already beyond him,
    not needing to acknowledge a mere man
    etched as afterthought among sheep.
    What’s left of his head is always in his hands.
    Crinkled and cracking backdrop
    of Sacra Familia, he is tagged dispensable
    whenever the three are considered.
    The child and mother are polished,
    redeemed, lifted almost to breathing.
    Their color deafens. He is crutch,
    inn searcher, tonal balance,