soft and fingerless as oven-mitts. Landscape

generic smiles. Fox fur caps, dog

 

whistles, red wagon races. No blood

on their breath. But I had to bury

 

the blue baby shoes, because all I got was this fistful

of daughters and birdlime. The oldest grows

 

her fingernails long and pointed as lectures

while wasps make nests in her coils

 

of hair. It was the famine year, all we had

to eat were the candlesticks. Hounds

 

tightening concentric circles around the house.

Everything was closing in when the second

 

girl was born, the floor plan and chambers

of her heart elaborate as a plantation manor.

 

But her teeth rest in the grass like a tangle

of cottonmouths. She drops her jaw, peels

 

back her lips, and flashes us her sickly white

gums and tongue. We all dance

 

wide orbits away from her.

Now the third girl is born, pristine

 

and pupil-less. Let me long for nothing but these

mice, my cat mouth.