THE SO-CALLED AVANT GARDIST GIVES A READING FOR A SO-CALLED AUDIENCE
-against M.B.'s abstractions

She squeezes the mic as though it were a bovine teat
          dispensing the milk of authority;
her eyes never leave the ink long enough to look up;

her lowered lids "create a luminous room"
          all her own, "veiling the space,"
where her neurons brush each other's tips and moon

for "the body," for the roomful of knuckles and lungs and livers,
          to be more specific,
for her "body," from which a repressed reptilian self

with mammal-skin shoes still manages to emanate;
                  yes, her fumes
          of the unsaid rise
the way forgotten apples in the pantry come to reek.