It Blooms in the Gut

Kelsey kills
another five
in the kitchen bathroom, not
using, just sitting and
mopping sweat
with rough paper towels, her hair
slickened and dark
across her brow.

Hangers with ties, rumpled
white button-ups, server
shirts, hair-gell, and paper
for bodies in need, this 
is a utility closet 
with a porcelain throne,
she muses silently,
and I'm its temporary queen.
Wristwatch, shaving-nicks
on her pearlescent shins,
bussing apron stained and strewn
like her laundry back home.
I make my mark
wherever I go. She touches
the tender scars
of her lower legs, stands,
sways for the thud
of a few blood confused moments
and undoes the latch, kills
the light, and walks out.

The sluggish bedding slips
her pale shoulders
in turning from open space and
coffee table lip
to plush furniture backing,
a vertical frame of foam
for her face to press against,
or pretend to rest as
soft voices whisper defferential
to her faux-insensate form,
sluggish and crackling
teeth
like enameled tectonic plates;
and she crumbles, and
half of her head feels thick
with unseen tunnels
ore-laden and too close
to fault-lines or
buried nerves.

The coffee taste
still burns her mouth, but
cool
water
doesn't exist in the mouth; it
blooms in the gut, an
icy bath of clarity itself, and
that's her center
for five seconds; for five seconds
she revolves around it
tranquil as a top.

Curiously (or not) cocktails
reach that spot, flowering
in hot amber and subdermal violet, or
stung red by the salt-rich sea
(only oxidizing rarely) sea-sick
with the punch-drunk
revolutions wobbling, tripping
as their centers grow.

Eyes open,
throat hot
with the thick cord of liquid
downed
in a triumph of thirst,
steady, weight
pinioned against her small, padded hands,
fingernails
too long,
trying to sink
into a frozen quicksilver pool.

She works to wright her sway.
Sails of sleeves,
white, billow in breezes
and cling to hollows
where air has escaped; her
hollows rasp breezily
and she shifts
and tugs at her bra-strap.