When Dancers Forget Their Way

there’s a darkness
lifting the weight of my flesh
tugging at my arm
wanting a nip at my veins
wanting a touch of

what makes me strong

she’s a figure eight of
millennium
every breath full of cigarette smoke
her body
bruised by unfriendly fingers

little ballet slippers
on her battered feet

fingernails stained a permanent
red and black
her teeth are spades and clubs
diamonds and hearts

and in her throat
I think I see her erratic pulse

her kitten-clawed back
I don’t know if it knows
how to arch any more

it’s been years since
she let herself remember rhythm
years since she remembered
she could have been a surgeon

now she dissects out a full house
reaches for the chips
takes a sip of some septic tank
the liquid is puce across leaden lips
her tongue thrashes about in cobwebs
trying to escape her acrid mouth

I’d like to tell her to
stop scraping her skin off
along the edges of the road
stop dragging her knuckles
making them bleed
on the asphalt

this is what it feels like
to fall in love in Middle America
where you’re neither quite
teetering into hell
nor rising back into Eden

she doesn’t want to be rescued
claims she won’t feed again
but that desire to nurse from my liver
won’t allow me

to forgive her