I haven’t seen my ankles in weeks I tell the young men so they lift back the linen to simply another linen.
All deposits sealed in lemon envelopes pass between intervals of blue and blue where I too await a separate set of hands.
When I am a television I am not in HD and the young men come monthly to adjust my antennae.
With mouths sewn shut they come for when pandered I coil to wool and let the moths feast and burrow as they please.
Lethargy be not a habit of the equine yet daily I grow cloven in my restlessness as the young men present me with trays of silverware.
Throw seeds on the garden of vibrating tubers and wake to the seeds crawled back to my navel.
Violets bloom in a rabbit trap and I am asleep thistles twist the vine and I am asleep equine asleep in a tank of poppies and hemlock tea.
When I am an eyelid in cinéma vérité I wander the cavern to find the young men who tremble and quake.
In this one the seamstress sews over the river a mission of twine and spiders appear where they did not before.
In this one the séance a bong blown over by gust and cup foregoes the dead and webs to a bristle of broom its handle of cob.
What is a fingernail to the skin of a pear or a pearl to the pit of a peach or a fin to the wing of the finch?
If a trough of cherry puree I pretend I can loom the tails of swine and then I am able to endure the remains.

Ellen Boyette is an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she is a Teaching-Writing Fellow and an editorial assistant for The Iowa Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming from Prelude, Tagvverk, Flag + Void, poets.org, and elsewhere.