Kelly Bancroft
	Time-piece The childless woman I've just met says she could set her watch by my biological tick. A girl's goldfish flickers in a bag. A husband scolds his wife eyeing a clock-- You got time to kill? Inmates in neon poke the earth with sticks along the highway. In the bundles they leave behind I picture babies, denture-pink, black cords brittle as November's stems. Some days are like this. Other days I am my Aunt Edna, the blood of her stitched and re-stitched heart inching through pig's valves until her death. At the kitchen table once she said to listen-- Hear the tiny, flowering ex- halation, the close and click? There's no Big Ben in me, no Grandfather, no rigged dynamite stick. But I sometimes hear it-- a cheap time-piece in a kid's game. Rickety cardboard spinner or an egg-timer: A minute to find the answer, a minute to unscramble some sense, a minute to move your marker, a minute to jump a fence.
	The Glucose Bird As the eye rejects the lash As the soul reflects the breath Marilyn’s hands are candle wax The oxygen tank a bubbling sack The glucose store is her sugary bird perched on the silver bed-rails Where or where does the energy go When an woman dies, a room pales Only the glucose bird sounds out Song of rising, song of swallowing Our cartoon thoughts, our scripted clouds The z’s rise out of our slumbering mouths Not chainsaws or timber but a song like sawing Song of circulation, song of cells Her mouth is public, her partials loose Tomorrow they will sew the mouth shut The glucose bird gurgles its song Song between this woman’s pulse and plateau, Song between the flesh’s green and yellow Into her veins the glucose bird sings All night long for the dead mother The overworked father, the under-loved daughter The first husband’s treason, the second one’s greed The glucose bird combs the air for seed