Consider how a Honduran
blood-espresso bean is
laundered into Maxwell House
slurry. It parts with supple, white flesh, spreading open
and glittering the stainless
vat walls: goat milk, ground cane dispersed
courtesy of a teaspoon’s
backsided heel and then
pounded, teeming, a sample
in saccharine sawdust and
sugared ball bearings taken
for examination under
a spyglass, then regrouped, shrink-
wrapped, readied for the kettle. Consider
the oxide in her breath, the thrum
of a metropolis in agony and
hiccupping in time to
the transmission in
a secondhand Saturn
Astra. Consider
how
the county clerk wore Sears lip gloss: Aurora #12, peeling
astrisk decals and control stamps that inflamed, deepened
the corners of a mouth, hue draining
off in the open windows
of the Tahoe chill. Consider the
muted, mottled stain of violet in a
chardonnay stopper inching alongside a margarine
tub, the tines of a dessert fork as
sunlight penetrates
through the polyester
awning and into the distended Turkish
rug. A clawfoot
bathtub and half-head of Irish Spring
sits, cross-legged—compressed—
with a Gillette Venus cartridge
and porcelain kneecaps: two eroded
Doberman's fangs and pivoting
tendon glimmering
among starfish and
lye crystals limping past,
windmilling fingers and
chrome-plated drains prying
apart wakes in these
dark, foaming
waters.