Nobody lives on Herlihy, Goldie,
          Nobody sleeps there either, and also
          Nobody finds this reckoning funny.
          I took you for more of a dick joke girl.

                                                         On Nobody:

He was named for two streets in the city,
                                        I won’t say which,
and cut meat at the dirty Kroger,
the one that sold head cheese
                                        and jicama sticks;

he once drew a trash bag over his head
                     and approached the Tarpon,
     stationed there maybe a tour or two longer,
     who’d butterfly loins with his cold
                      and untarnished hands
     and then pick over the duty-free cola encased
     in a tepid, community cooler,
     the ice rubbed red, enrobing discoloring cans
     in a clabbering grenadine;
                                                       and said to him, “Tarpon,
      Fuck me”—
                             he thought he resembled
          a crinkly condom: a cock
                  encased in a staticky tube sock.

He was a Leo, as well, he confided.
He loured in prying the ribs from the ribeyes.
He’d been hired
   back, some years ago, back
   when the thewsome butchers might
                                                             passively
   ash amongst ruffles of Swiss steak,
   parliaments clung at each twist of their callused lips
   and no cherry-brined blood upon half-snuffed stubs 
                                                                   in the floor drain,
   bones of a plundered shoat
   arranged like a rain-addled camp fire
   kicked to a smearing sigil or hieroglyph.

He’d begun to strictly stock the cold cuts,
knackwurst, chicken franks, scowling souse.
His back, you’ll see, had begun to unbuckle.

       When wrapping a bevy of beef once,
       over and under in finicky ripples of plastic
                       film, he’d conceived it
                                the wisest thing
                                   to present to me
                                               there, in his palm, as a bastard tomcat
                stages a sparrow on some young, sun-slopped stoop,
amongst pinguid fronds that
hours of sawing strips from marbling loins
            had engorged to the turbulent girth of beer brats;
            some diseased, still-sallowing molar plucked
            from pinked and enfeebling gums,
                                                     a tick picked plump as a pallid plum
            and bowled along pimpling knobs of a balding dog’s back.

                                                      He wanted to be
                               a firefighter. He’d fought in the war,
        the bad one,
                                  use to ride motorbikes
                                                  or something,
        veal and vellum enticed
            to dissemble a shawl
            or a mantle inherited, viscid and thin as a jellyfish
            stretched to encumber an oak

in aspic.
One namesake street was where a small school ran
      eye-to-eye with the murders of
      cracked and abandoned mansions; the other
      laid out by the mall, the Orwellian district,
      where once whilom places empyrean,
      paddocks stretched ever and always
      blushed with the violets, rapeseed, jonquils,
      dandelions, gilt and delicious, the irises
      cudded by wobbly box homes, teething,
      squeezed amid corsets of cringing vinyl,
      preening as teeth struck dead yet stuck,
      left milling and mincing meat by wanton will alone— left

wizened then,
                          borne bald as the sperm
                       of a cottonwood felled
                    by a wheezing breeze,
    he kept to himself
    a resplendent tear,
    the days condensed
                   as dew upon tramp-trod clover.

A wren lays waste to his Saint on the street sign, dollop of
                                teeth refined in titanium white
                                        to a torpid, sore, and sartorial simper—
                                  linen left scowling, souring, whimpering,
                                                  raveling threads to a flimsy flax.
Bald pinschers bay
in the greening gloom
of another young dusk descending,
           ripe as a throbbing and bottlenecked jack fruit
some rushed shopper abandoned in bunkers of shanks
and flank steaks pimpling green as a weed.