AGING GODESS SEEKS COMPANION, UNDERSTUDY

Our Lady of Morning Breath

blows into her hand and sniffs—

odor of last night’s

cigarettes, and the taste of sex

she hasn’t had yet, mix

with the pasty smell of

old blood; her sensitive gums

acting up again.

She consults her Day Planner,

a crow perched on the iron lip

of a music stand in the corner.

“Bring me water,” he pants,

“you lazy ho, don’t you know

what time it is?”

Our Lady is not guilty

of sloth, she’s just In Recovery

from years as the heavy G’s bag bride,

and life without crystal’s

a sludge and mud agony,

some days.

Not to mention chronic

fatigue and mercury poisoning,

asthma’s large hand flexed

to compress her chest

every second the AQI pushes 140.

10am and already this summer day’s thick

with particulates,

and she thinks she’s doing pretty goddamned well,

all operative poisons considered.

From birth, she has felt the smack

of every hour vibrate

along her slack muscle fibers, hell yeah

she knows what age,

what era,

what stage of the drama it is.

In a self-righteous hacking fit

she coughs up soil and mineral grit,

along with thirteen shriveled

corn kernels, from which she divines

a To-Do list:  Worry if food

can be both transgenic and traditional.

Worry about who

will sanctify the slag heaps

of gold and uranium mines,

who will die

for the eco-sins of “the industrial world.”

She spits on the seeds, rubs them

between her rough palms

to get the flip-side of their gist:

Stop snorting lines

of anxiety

to feed your destruction jones:

get with a fifteen-year-old

virgin with flexi-bones,

roll her like a stunt horse in the dust,

place your tongue at the rusty source

of her underground springs—

then take her shopping

for a new serpent skirt,

a necklace of skulls.