CLAIRE OLESON





DECAPITATED SONG


to test a horse for rabies, you must
cut its head off and mail it. two bags:
one for the head, one for its trust
in light, sky, and your hands. a nag's

bad walk shows that it's all lost.
a doctor to come in the next day
with barbiturates and a bone saw, true
you decided to start being clay

in time for summer. old now, you admit
is something you'd like to get to. without help,
your father in the nursing home's blue limits
helps a twenty-something aid fight back

against a gone-mad ex-boyfriend. he downs him.
you have to cut off the head to cut off the head.
this takes forty minutes, which takes all day.
they send him away; they don't kill him.

I ask to bum some of your testosterone.
you ask me to hold a forty-pound bag
without looking inside.



***



WITHOUT INSURANCE


gasoline hanging in the parking lot air like a friend's dog:
half-familiar, half wilderness. love? well, just
remember me to the car

that got us from the hospital
(out too early, out like still-setting gelatin)
you saying: hold me, but don't touch.
(they didn't have your info yet,
you insisted, and could not bill you)

I want dinner so meanly. this is when
we personalize the general: the sun is yellow;
until you look really, stare: this sun is white, then blue-green
as a kindergarten model of earth
as you carry it home in closed eyes. the cost
would need your name in it
to matter. I learn where your waist is,
what your weight is, how to move it
as butter on butter on asphalt.






AUTOCORRECT: TWO