Cooper Esteban
I was neither in the vanguard nor the retinue.
You must have known that.
My white finger-joints.
No one can have missed it.
We called them cleaning rags,
but they tinted the pyre like hematite dust.
Imagine this—the cells are bricks
adhering without mortar.
We like to shove them apart.
We like to see them bleeding at the gums.
What if, they all thought, we wore flames
instead of eye-liner?
“He called them pasties,” the new kid whispered.
Licking his fingers at the door of the canteen.
The fossil of a horse's spine
exposed when the channels ran dry.
The hairs of his mane variegated
by water like a groom's splintered brush.