Mouth

When she bought the thrift shop ventriloquist’s dummy,

she said, Who could resist him? and it was true,

a little man who’d sit on your lap

and say the things your lips should not.

And they were expensive, these things, custom

made, she believed, though that was what

at last began to bother her about him:

the coiffed black hair, the pencil mustache,

his diminutive, excellent tuxedo,

like a dollhouse playboy or a maitre d’ nose high

to the place setting. It wasn’t so much

how he looked drolly on as she made love

with a larger if less wooden man, but that

she’d sometimes think to sit him on her bare thigh

afterward as he reviewed his competitor’s performance.

And it wasn’t that her hand inside him made her,

or him, or them, cruel exactly, or even unkind,

though there were sighs she could fake

and words he would not. It wasn’t even the lover

who took him by the throat and tossed him face first

back on his corner chair and then took her again,

and harder, nor that as he did she imagined

the fleshly man the dummy, the taste

of his sweat the dummy’s sweat, the smell

of his dangerous rage the source of the words

only the dummy could utter. No. It was,

she insisted, the mouth nothing ever entered

but from within, and how she could open that mouth

all the way and tilt back the empty head of him

and laugh, and laugh, from the gut, from the heart,

which was nothing more or less than her fist.