He had track pants and cuts under his track pants. He had cuts under his track pants, I knew, ‘cause the trickles ran out and branched. That night, for the staff meeting—he was there first, his legs flexing in pinned V’s. He was bleeding, he said, from an arrow struck in his thigh. Foamed pipes in the ceiling hissed...
A co-worker told me how they’d come in at six and find him locked in the office. Borne along by the striped arms of dawn in their cars, security would see him at four with the key. He grew another head, inside my mind—in the heads of my co-workers, also. But in my heart...I have thick fingers, I put them in my gelly gin...I think of him with his stomach on the office-chairs, and the branches growing down his ankles. I think of him with sideburns, added; hairspray, added; chest and stomach hair, added. The alphabets of marked midsections, anatomized cleanly in my view.
My coils—I’ve slipped now—oh, torn out by the dig of a clean metal pump. Cool, clotted cream slipping out of his “O”; on the oak desk, unfortunate opened planners blotted. All my friends are saying, “Girl, don’t, don’t!” The pipes stop and huff with us...
The sun rose then with dawn as the dyed mantle slipped on its head; we’re far out of the 1970’s now, and now we don’t have such dawns; but so it was that next morn, and each bell in the near neighborhood rung. And then we bore striped flowers to our co-worker’s funeral.
-2001
