The Beastangel by Alison C. Rollins

The Beastangel

  After Robert Hayden’s “Bone-Flower Elegy”

In the dream I enter him

I      the eater of numbers

the black-lipped barcode

of cost have come for him

because he owes me. He

owes me the broken machine

the bone structure gone limp

over leg of time. I      irreverent

as safe sex breathlessly

whispering this is not a threat

but a promise for the love of

the wolf on lockdown. Why

the long face? the horsefly

asked the muzzle as though to

suggest these mouths we

have are traps, bold-faced lairs

of brotherhood. Cover your eyes

and you’ll miss it, you’ll miss this

squalid city growing legs from its

scalp. His kneecaps jerked beneath

the sheet, skinned eyelids rolling back

to the /     Point to where he touched

you on the doll, he asked.

¿cómo se dice “everywhere”?

He will pay for this, the heroic

antihero announced, the vulture-

masked man surveying the damage

the clinical centaur now spooked

his hind legs reared as if to say

demons fear beasts in twos.

Rage bound tight in synthetic

skin /     bound and ridden in dialect

at an angle of consumption. After

feeding he asks, What’s the damage?

The legless caterpillar humping itself

forward /    toward my mouth, rending

the lip a cleft palate, twisted up from

firegold sand, a habit of creature

malformed. The men laid flowers

on my mother’s tongue, they come

see about me. These flowers are edible

men /      flowers of sawtooth bone.