Our Lady of Morning Breath

            blows into her hand and sniffs—

            odor of last night’s

            cigarettes, and the taste of sex

            she hasn’t had yet, mix

            with the pasty smell of

            old blood; her sensitive gums

            acting up again.

            She consults her Day Planner,

            a crow perched on the iron lip

            of a music stand in the corner.

            “Bring me water,” he pants,

            “you lazy ho, don’t you know

            what time it is?”

            Our Lady is not guilty

            of sloth, she’s just In Recovery

            from years as the heavy G’s bag bride,

            and life without crystal’s

            a sludge and mud agony,

            some days.

            Not to mention chronic

            fatigue and mercury poisoning,

            asthma’s large hand flexed

            to compress her chest

            every second the AQI pushes 140.

            10am and already this summer day’s thick

            with particulates,

            and she thinks she’s doing pretty goddamned well,

            all operative poisons considered.

            From birth, she has felt the smack

            of every hour vibrate

            along her slack muscle fibers, hell yeah

            she knows what age,

            what era,

            what stage of the drama it is.

            In a self-righteous hacking fit

            she coughs up soil and mineral grit,

            along with thirteen shriveled

            corn kernels, from which she divines

            a To-Do list:  Worry if food

            can be both transgenic and traditional.

            Worry about who

            will sanctify the slag heaps

            of gold and uranium mines,

            who will die

            for the eco-sins of “the industrial world.”

            She spits on the seeds, rubs them

            between her rough palms

            to get the flip-side of their gist:

            Stop snorting lines

            of anxiety

            to feed your destruction jones:

            get with a fifteen-year-old

            virgin with flexi-bones,

            roll her like a stunt horse in the dust,

            place your tongue at the rusty source

            of her underground springs—

            then take her shopping

            for a new serpent skirt,

            a necklace of skulls.

Copyright © Maria Melendez, 2005. All Rights Reserved.