Repertoire #2

another time, I won't
permit you to surprise me.
I have my own pair of feet,
and my hands are pretty and small
and white beside yours. China birds,
straw men fluffing over in fields, a
black eye tweaked in my direction; I
have come undone easily before, grown
untwined under a blanket of snow. I've been
chipped in a corner of this house
where the green paint of the front hall
slips orders to the dusty brown baseboards,
in a corner where the laundry detergent's smell
hunts me like a rabbit, imperfect here in this corner
where the spiny legs of the table hide me. Tomorrow
I won't let you surprise me anymore, daring and suspect.
Justice is a prickly cactus in the window,
getting brown, and dead (though just as harmful)
without care.