I have given him my hand but not the rest of me.
He does with my hand what he likes.
Places it between two pages in a novel by Dostoyevsky
says feel
says there is no such thing as God.
Sometimes he leaves it sitting on the table for hours.
I watch it from the kitchen where I try to cut lemons
with my teeth.
My hand becomes his hand in the dark.
It writes out a word on a pale back.
The word is in another language.
It means: Custer’s last stand.
It means: Ozymandias.
On Wednesday mornings it shows up
on the back of a milk carton. The fingers
spell out the word missing.
He puts it on the name of a town on a map,
he puts it around the button of his pants
and uses it to dig into a pack of cigarettes.
There is a name for this—
