What they don’t tell you about starvation
is that you hunger for nothing.
The pounds drop, an exhausted mother
letting go of a wailing newborn. Inches
slough away, callouses and tired skin
pumiced off with a burning stone.
I never once felt empty.
Instead, my stomach grew tauter,
crescent arrangements wilting beneath eyes
bruised and battered as wedding day gardenias
buried in creams and powders –
and my hip bones blossomed,
a quiet display of Asiatic lilies,
sickeningly sweet and nearly weeping
before the decay sets in.

Miguel fed me sips of whiskey as he stitched
a nadie te pareces desde que yo te amo
across my rib cage in between
moles and scars and halting English,
discarded fragments of the cancer.
In the undergrad days,
my professor said always, always
have beautiful words –
other than your own –
running through your head.
You don’t want to wake up
locked in solitary confinement alone.
Every day comes in the end.
The malignancy is the shackles, you
were the padded walls
and a Chilean poet was my grasping hope
escaped from my slipping mind,
a pedestal beneath carved breasts.

The years whipped strap burns through my fingers,
gnawing on slippery palms as I scrambled
to tie-down rope you,
a cowboy cinching a calf’s noose.
We were in Pendleton,
the last stop on a lifetime of pulling leather.
You bought me a Stetson and snapped
roll after roll as the Indians strapped
on paper numbers and feathers,
dancing for the white crowds.
You,
above my huckleberry, I thought impossible
to break – 

clove-hitched to my post
as I slipped hobbles over your boots
in our heat-soaked boom town,
manure cloying as a perfume.