after the painting by Georgia O’Keefe Dark, imposing flesh. Darker still its center, like the tongue of a cow that has for a week now been dead, spent during calf-birth, and the calf still clinging to her, and his own tongue wild for want of milk, and the calf with flies in his eyes—that color: near-to- purple, bruised. I should call it beautiful, or beauty itself, this dark room, broom closet, this nigger-dot. I should want to fit into it, stand up in it, rest, as would any beast inside a stable. I should want to own it, force it mine, to know it is my nature, and of course don’t I? Of course: why shouldn’t I want it? Black mirror. Space delicate and cracked. Now anything could go in there: a fist, veined, fat. A body. And here runs the blood through the body, deep, watery. And here runs the message in the blood: this is it—fuck her fag like you’re supposed to. And when the wind shakes and when the iris shakes in it, the lips of the flower shaping to the thing that invades it, that will be me, there, shaking, my voice shaking, like the legs of the calf, who—out of fear? out of duty?—is sitting by his dead mother because what else will he do? What else has he? Only because the voice outside him makes him.