Maybe I carry animals in my pockets.

And where you imagine I’ve tucked a barrel’s nose,

lies instead the wet, huffing muzzle of a beast

untamed by my fleshwarm dark. A hunger I thumb

through all of taxonomy to identify: fanged

as a piranha, madder than an orphaned cub. When I disappear

my hands into those twin wilds, they reemerge

claw-mauled and dripping. How delicious, this agony

like pressing a bruise to deeper blue and calling it night.

Allow me, if nothing else, a moment to lap at what leaks.

I have a certain sickness that makes me love 

my freshest stripes, and maybe I’m proud, above all, of this

red touch. Of the way no one leaves my embrace 

with a shirt as white as it was when I first held them.   

My sternum, itself a pocket; my clavicles, threadbare seams.

My gasp catches soft as lint in thick hair. When I die,

I hope to leave behind—more than an unleaded chest—

a viscid stain, its brassy wax. Maybe all I need

is to know you won’t walk away from me clean.

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