wolf

Ira Celis

her teeth like honey for awhile.

swallowing the best parts of you

awhile

you were looking, all wet-eyed admiring

love made into mouth.

it isn’t shameful,

to love another woman like the women in your family have always

loved their men

it is sacred

and umbilical,

to feed the one you love intimacies.

she, bottomless and looking past you,

makes our stomach growl again.

family curse:

you fall in love,

you shave the upper lip of a woman so pretty that she doesn’t have to

tell the truth,

a good man and a hunter.

and you, brave though she brings nothing home,

not even herself.

as you were born an empty room, an empty field

and as dust yields dust, so you multiply in silt,

you

filthy

have nothing to give you

hole, you

gaping

pulled taut and still by desire how

/gi r l/ of you to be

hole you

hungry, filthy,

crumbling, thing

will you live the life of the resurrected, of your great-great-

grandmother, but weaker?

with skin warped like gatepost from all the comings and goings;

great-grandmother.

and like your grandmother now,

left.

drag your ox heart across the floor,

tearing lover-sized holes into walls

bruising teak, gouging garden plots into tear-watered bedroom floors,

growing

nothing.

willed an inherited seedlessness

like your mother

she gave birth only to an absence.

and when they ask, you say:

the wind grew horns

the wind gored my house,