It settles into the stomach wall and plies
its sinuous trade, hawking green-eyed girls
at the tented market of the womb — thin-mattresses
waifs with syringe-scored ribs.
Under fallopian awnings
they turn their chlorinated eyes inward,
lashes slice into the flesh as they blink slowly,
once, twice.

Envy sidles into the blood, jangling metals and plastics,
is yearn-swollen fingers all ringed in agates and amethyst–
so fat that knuckles bulge tumescent out of the gold bands.

Eel-headed, it stretches and pants, breath filled
with rotted diamonds.
It claws and adores and kisses the edge
without guessing the center, cobbling a
hermetic path, yellow and grey,
down into the rickety basement door
of the second heart–
the secret heart, shut as a reliquary
that whispers sulfuric villanelles into the dark
while storm shutters screen against glass
threatening expulsion from the apple-bled
rooms of the interior.