Prepare This Place For Bed

These bees in my mouth: oily, waxy, powerful—

one flew into my mother’s mouth at a family picnic

and I was her shoulder shawl, oiled and painted

like the women in the Frick under bronze lamps,

horseheads and jewels, Penn Station, seven a.m.,

yeast on the breath and sugar digests

the bees that move from mouth to mouth and flower

from whatever drips out, fortified orange juice is fine.

I stare at the split flip display totaling the Carolinian miles south

and the Maple Leaf train, coming to pick me up.

Some drugs are kind to me, and some seven a.m.s are

fresh and my skin is taut, even toned.

Precision reminds us of something that reminds us of

how the world feels, not is: this is sick, God is.

What conference do I wish the train would stop for?

If it isn’t here, I won’t be there. I can’t move these days.

God, I only talk to you when I can focus, when I devote,

when I’m hiding. Ever feel like a drip?

I want to go into a hole in a tree and call you

to tell you I saw you

dancing around a woman in circles,

your hand on her waist, her fixed point.

Look above the awning at the moon, it’s right above you, God,

and you think no one sees you outside the smoking towers.

I never look at anyone closely in my dreams.

Our charter limits us: the awning, the ream, 

how one October long ago the singsong

of trick-or-treat made me so aware of the body,

how our homes are our body, how you’re choosing another

body. Barns in my hands, bobby pins—my whole body

is a womb. Prepare this place for bed.

My mother calls and says she’s going to the Frick this weekend, as if everyone

knows what the Frick is, the cross streets, its smell of manure

the horse carriages leave behind.

I feel like my body hasn’t left that moment long ago

when my mother opened her mouth and pain flew in,

how synonymous it became to vulnerability. Waiting for this train,

I am and am not a woman, in a suit.