I dream in red. No
more the dark pink insides
splayed, a watermelon flung
from a speeding truck, smashed
in the street into jagged teeth,
tender gums. An object of
sympathy, but I am no
Phillis Wheatley, freed only
after the master is dead. I’m my own
martyr, finding again a cheek to turn,
too many times I did. Is this really
happening, as in the woods when I
was ten, fucking schoolboys for cigarette butts
and loose change, sometimes six at a time?
They called me Cigarette Pig, what did I know
of protection? Where went the dank green cave
for me to hide in? Never the cool moss, steady drip
of an inner source. Never the black hole to suck me
inverted, travel my bowed legs to Shangri-La, green-
sea valleyed and mountain pined, where no one dies:
what the Nazis tried to find to build their clean race.
Talk about pricks, like just before the steady drip that
awaits, me strapped, held in place for it, all I know, have
ever. Stars predict for me no last meal of good Christian
blood, my sick grandad who loved red Eucharist wine,
something newly slick to hold perverse in his hands. Me,
I’m a beer girl, a real American vagabond. You bet your
life. My hair still the gold of wheat, and when I dream
his beat-up truck, it reminds me of me.