July - Thin White Rope

Last July I bought some opium incense

Didn’t know that that was once your brand

Wintertime I spark it to erase the scent of your sadistic man

You healed your bruises with cigarettes

And drove for hours wasted in the fog

To be where other women wouldn’t call you things

Where men wouldn’t sniff you out like dogs

If only just once you’d told me you don’t like men who treat you like dirt

Who slip you drugs intended to seduce which travel deep and cause you hurt

I wonder what would happen if

You learned to speak of your contempt

Instead you celebrate your face

By lending it to each of them

The redneck in me wants to prove, the college boy is scared to move

The homemaker has quit his job, the nihilist has found a god

A carpenter who takes an axe, a moth who burrows into wax

A chain between you and the ape — the missing link was Joan the Saint

I think you are the girl who sees a quarter inch through everything

Sees bodies underneath their clothes, no faces, only peeled bones

Your father was the artist who took pictures every day of you

And made a stop-motion film that shows you turning into him

I wonder how the Pharoah knew he had to save himself for you

And when I got to take his place I praise the years that burned his face