Mollie & Lobo Wolf Girl

Dear Mother
The Devil has a river in Texas that is all his own
–Mollie Dent’s last letter, Autumn 1835

 

you are always
walking me
into canyons

at dusk
I am always

wearing a slab
of meat on a string
around my neck

the red spreads long
fingers between
my breasts
I am always
to the sky

 

for a pretty piece of color

+

the pups
do they suckle
you soft?

 

mouths half-dog half-gentle

 

pink as a baby doll’s
cloth belly

 

into the breaks

 

babe in arms
babe in teeth

noise of the men’s horses
in the water
like a cup spilling forever

tell me            please
how do you sooth
the little monsters?

My sugar-tit:
these words to this
empty

 

 

we were strangers
from the first

 

 

Notes on the Tower

“I began to weep, and said, ‘Ross ham;’ by which I meant to say, he shall not always plague me so with speaking, all this gives me very great pain…and by ‘Ross ham,’ I meant to say, that he should also give me my horses.”

-The Diary of Kaspar Hauser

 

said horse meant bells
horse meant light through the window
horse meant pain from light through the window
meant torn fingernail light through the window
horse meant wooden horse
meant wooden horse with a red ribbon around its neck
horse meant bread & water
meant making the bread the pressing of it round
like dark on an eyelid
meant muzzle in your palm
meant field sugared in rain
meant horse eating the grass you tore
meant father
meant bread but no water
meant horse
meant the word horse
meant sound of the wooden horse on the stone floor a stair
going neither up nor down
meant light that came & went
meant wooden horses given new names every day
red ribbons cutting off their laddered throats their whineys a word
you had not yet learned
meant hunger
meant trouble
bread & water
bells again