Ten Broken Loves
in the Afternoon
An eight-headed lion jumps from a bush
and destroys an eight-year-old boy.
He’s going to make a boneyard of
this residential suburb,
eat all of their young ones, crash their houses,
urinate
on their old.
He devours the boy’s limbs and mauls the face
and is wiping the boy’s blood
from the lids of his eyes, when he sees
a woman across the street mowing her lawn.
He is so strongly whelmed in love for her
that each of his heads swoon
and one begins breathing hard,
and one begins drinking,
and one purrs so loudly
that another becomes deaf.
She notices the lion and his scarry heads and
red paws, his yellow eyes and ragged haunches.
“You there, beast.” she says,
her foot on the mower while she slides
her dress over, showing her leg.
“What are you looking at?” she says.
He forgets the meal he’s created
of the boy near his feet,
and he reels inside from an echo
of her voice.
“I can spit to the Sun
and make noses bleed with the
waft of my sweat,”
he says from one of his heads,
“But I can’t love any more than I do,
having seen you there.”
She rubs down to the edge of her cunt
and lets her smell blend with the cut grass.
“I can shower it on you from where I am,” he says,
“I can shoot it high over the street and cover you.”
“Well, can I expect vows?” she asks.
“Baby, you creature, I’m catholic,
I’m made of vows. I’ll let every
portion of my hideousness until death,
to you, all of it’s yours, I’m certain.”
“Will you mow the rest of
the lawn for me?” she asks.
The moon and Sun are both in the sky,
one sewn into the cloth of the other.
“…I’m sorry.” he says,
and they stare at each other
across the residential street
to the smells of death and cunt
and words and grass.