I touch my thick skinned palm
to the side of my face
where the hair on my cheek grows thinner
from the hours spent pressed to a mattress
dead asleep and wonder
at the cracks and hairs of ripped,
yet to be work stripped, knobs of callous
where the knuckles join with crooked digits.
I ask myself what those hairs and cracks
meant to the side of your ribs and the skin,
thin and charged and contiguous and
river bed cool, there.
I do not answer and slip
instead to dreams. To the calming heat of
solid steel against steel, shining bright
where the red and white warning paint has worn away,
pressing along my forearm like a boa
searching for my throat. The perfection
in her build. The cleanliness in the depression of
her switch that guns the ram down and
flushes hot air, like a shower I have yet to take,
where my shoulder touches
the die on its slow upward climb. Holding me
there, hand inside the mouth, broken skin
to a smoothness I used to understand
in human terms.
