I Could Never Be Her Lover

Her orange city is grinning,
blue-thighed and wrapped around
milky light, drizzled streets
a cold-flesh cement tracing,
old men and young girls blinded
with pumping shadow,
picasso-eyed cigarette smoke
scratching brown-spotted ceilings.

Sophia has taken on another lover,
her drunk lips sizzle-blue,
two ash-pierced candy fingers speaking
Spanish while eating a piano-boned moon.

She breathes, pebbles in dirty glass.
The rotary phone rings 29 times
before she knocks it to the floor,
busy harming herself like
splinter-glass to feel burning white.

Sophia only wears shoes when she
comes to visit me on wounded Mondays.
I could never be her lover,
I have not learned to drown
my whispering fetus.

First published in Zygote In My Coffee, July 2005