Oven’s glow. Or vast

hemoglobin

leap—

:the blasphemy

of their death-devoted word, lying

in the self-same blood

your open heart

still squanders.

Pulse—

and then what—(then

what?) —erupts in the skull

of the ghetto sphinx—that plumbs

the filth

and fever of the ones

who gave up. (Like you,

they still hover, still

hunger, immured in the bread

of no one’s flesh, still make themselves

felt):

as if, in the distance between

sundown and sunrise,

a hand

had gathered up your soul

and worked it with the stones

into the leaven

of earth.