1. born bigger than sin,
one big toe pushed from the womb
to test the feel of sunlight,
big feet upon the calescent earth
made new and red like a hot plate
for him, drunk-kneed, to walk.
2. if we were wise we would eat
our children, raw and fleshy,
that they may not grow so big.
we would be sharks, thick-bloated
in the loveless ocean.
3. the things he loved most:
ice cream, gum wrappers,
the nosing snuffle of wild pigs,
a world strange at sunset,
earthworms, eggshells, her.
4. tonsured bodies confuse him
with their lack of bristling,
their walking like pieces coming
together in the wrong places,
mechanically wrong, but lovely:
these curious half-children.
5. her knees were scraped on the inside,
hot-plate red and backward,
so he loved her crouching most,
her crookedness, her pure broken self.
“we are such beautiful monsters.”
6. if he were wise he would have
eaten her ice cream shoulders,
licked clean her ribcage,
but we are all fools in love.
7. she sees him slantwise
and incomplete, too big to take in
with his hair and rabbit blood smell.
good girls do not love monsters.
his hands could break her;
joyfully, she could become pieces.
8. made eggshell-shy by love,
afraid she will startle like
a mother pig, all this rooting
in the ground with him—the noises
9. shudder them out from reverie,
her knee-straight brothers.
world stuck like a gum-wrapper
around them: he is naked, carcass-big,
stripped of the cloth of himself,
10. his presence made mechanically
wrong so that the click is crooked
as the bullet cracks his brain pan:
now the world made so strange
his earthworm brain drunk
in a loveless ocean.
a truth: he loved joyfully,
heart scraped on the inside,
beautiful monster.