To Offer Up the Rib
Heather Napualani Hodges

A plot to alter:
the thing that walks its way across you.

A complex structure, this:
a greenhouse of mewing carnivorous plants,
broken at their scruffs.

The singular object, miles out, becoming a pluralism of parts, a thousand ribs.

You did not come from it,
but you are made of garden, it's true.

*

And then,
horror,
to make nothing.

The offer dead on your lips.

The completed removal not entirely necessary.

To know that the scraping of it was sacrifice enough.

*

The complaint, the admission, the heightened voice, the variant temperature.

What each creature is from far away:

a collection of all the above.

1996 © 2010