but give it twenty-years time, give it a lot
of desperate people. they say gender is performance but only (honestly)
class is performance, class is shunted off
on the everyday sexual life on the everyday person, all made
political so someone, in a fifteen-thousand-dollar apartment, can read
the new yorker and mastrubate without
guilt. the blue night comes faster. the sky comes around
the houses and takes them down with her
teeth. of course, night/sky is a
woman. i was also a desperate woman, i sat in the corner, i sat
in the window and let the glass take me down
with her teeth. this brave new world was supposed
to be an abyss; the literary world, an abyss; I wanted
an abyss. but here, also,
is social structure.
the man fucking me is the incarnate of this childhood night when
the country-grey smoke went softly into
the twilight, the dim carved out of late february ice
and raw long empty
nights. the man fucking me has blank eyes that i replace
with my mother, my sisters, the white tapboard house with
the mice leaning skyward
in the wind.
the last pavilion 