brothel

I knew her before she came here.

Her heart like a dug-up ditch, was before as firm as a trunk.

But adze-gashed in youth:

What was heart was ever after raw material.

(We see how the dark piles up:

The wrecked ruins of a once-white temple;

The ashes from a fire, long-ago-lapsed.)

This is where the prostitutes line up like pigeons

Sitting on a wire. Bird-thin and grim.

Drugged-numb as to stitch up guarded wounds.

Her eyes sag like drip-dirty rags, misused and polluted

With a dazed glaze draped thick over her pale-grown pupils:

She’s seen so much that now she refuses her own sight.

I think of her still: Whole nights (most nights) her legs up-tucked,

Fetus-like, wishing for reunion with wombly warmth.

She hides her eyes and chin from me in guilt.

Her hair whips in the wind

like a white handkerchief waving goodbye.





c. dylan bassett (Las Vegas, NV, 1987)