ABSTRACT
for Marvin Bell All night the blind entrance of the children. Where are they coming from, smelling of boiled milk, their bodies sliding beneath each other like fish? Because my wife hears noise, I go down to the cellar to look. Nothing moves. The air is damp with sex, Animals no one has named live here, the ones who become children, who eat each other's eyes in our dreams. I can't find them. I would hook one by the mouth, its nerves crawling up my hand like hot worms, and rake its brain until it talked roots. Does their absence follow me, hidden as breath in speech? Once upstairs, I talk: in my old room there's a bed where I curl up & one light that burns holes in closed eyes. Each time I call my mother I get smaller & she will not help. My wife has heard it before. She won't ask for a child alive inside her although she holds my mouth to her breast. She prefers me beneath her. Breathless, I pretend to enter her with knives.
