The next time I saw her,
Her face was erased,
Features hardly discernable any more
And only with the succor of overdone mascara.  

“Too much concealer,” she explained
Over her customary produce,
Though the spinach was puree
And the strawberries were lesions,
White bearded and leaking.  

Her physician, it so happened
Was a 19th Century medicine man
In disguise, his covered wagon
Stashed away behind the new
Postmodern medical complex.
He had cures for migraines hangnails
Papercuts laugh lines boredom
A spouse’s wandering eyes—  

I never know where people go
Once they step through
The automatic glass doors.
Open and shut open and shut,
Watch them long enough and they become
Maws gnawing bodies whole,
Nothing but the city’s dark
Gaping gullet beyond.  

Her voice strained, squeaked.
Her mouth sunk back into the blur,
eyes, nose, ears, hair, all smudged
like ink from a bleeding
Pen. She pulled out her lipstick, drew
Lips where the lips should be,
A bit too puffy, perhaps, as though
injected with novocaine.  

Syllables strained through
The inflated lips, “I’m addicted,
I’ve lost myself.” And, with that,
She drifted from my register, beyond
My humble realm of influence,
Into a night that never spat her out
Again.