The Lord ordered Lilith to live with the fat
bastards & abscessed howlers, What a job—
 
to be given dominion over all devouring hoards.
They saw her in thousand-fold swarms
 
at their long windows. In Babylonia, they etched
her on incantation bowls, buried her image upside 
 
down & underneath their baked-brick homes.
I imagine Lilith as a comforter. At the gallows
 
with Salem’s damned. Swirling the funeral pyre
of Pratibha Khan, a 19-year-old stoned to death
 
beyond recognition by her father & brother
for romancinga boy in a nearby village. 
 
Lilith, you are at the landfill guiding fertile cycles
of decay among fast food wrappers & mattress
 
springs. In the cold clinic cradling the aborted
waiting at my back door—banished

& misunderstood. Shadows we must
all gather back as we become one again.