Inside A Girl
       

is hot house
light and back stage
shimmying cancan dancers
freshly
demanned and gleaming
from the whisper cutter
when the soldiers came
back from the last flaggy war

liberally spray coolant
inside a girl
or her ghosts
will just stand around
yakking
about wintergreen demi-cups
and sateen flavors
in their underpants
saying wasn't this just
the girliest machine shop
in the good old days

they'll never get back to work
passing
shades
of areola brown lipsticks instead
unswept pubic shavings
will grow up in mounds
on the floor
inside a girl's
just a mass
of rusty underwire
scores of wet ringlets
cause it's so hot
in here it's tight
with dancing
pelvic bones
machined
to pop on loops
the girls
work like ants inside
grinding parts
in their skirts of moleskin
and tulle they do the sugarplum
they skinny out
marching the line
one by one

they pour out of the blown
red lips
of a tramped peony
thrown up
at the encore
I think
that's the part
where they take their
tops down

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Copyright © 2018 Elizabeth O'Brien All rights reserved
from A Secret History of World Wide Outage
Diode Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission