I gave my love a ring that has no end.

I gave my love a baby with no cryen.

                                                                                – The Riddle Song



A working shrine.

Red curtains, plastic chickens and torn lottery

ticket stubs in the pot of a collapsed palm.

Tulle-wrapped indoor tree trunk.

The vendor of cut fruit and live fish in buckets

can also tell fortunes. A faded

rubber figurine of The Hulk watches

over devotees, a reliable stream

of tourists, conscript dodgers, gamblers

and jilted lovers, though expectant

mothers are advised to avoid your threshold.

The television is always on.
Villagers present at your burial later saw you

wash vegetables and soothe your crying dead

baby on the river bank,

the old fabrics hanging

around your knees. You foraged

an unscented plot apart

from the commons, so they never had cause

to reproach you. 
Maybe that’s why we leave

the cosmetics, the toys, milk

bottles on the ground

behind your temple. We fear

and envy a woman who can say,

when I was dead, I refused

the unmasking
There is no love as monstrous

as a front porch swept clean

every evening thus when he returned from battle

one black morning sore

and sorrowful, you were ready with your perfect

silhouette display. 
A nested moon.

He liked to watch the fire cycling

through its shapeless leaps

and hues, its twisting contractions.

All night, you were the only one

who heard the high stuck cries from inside

the house, and the sound of the bottom

step breaking again—

and again.
So it’s true that when a woman is dead

husbands are the last to know.

In the movies, my favourite part was always

when he caught you elongating

your arm across the room—like a twice-chewed

stick of gum—to reach for the errant lime

because that’s the moment the game was up. 
It ended

with a kiss, his mouth sealing over

a rim of earth, our multiple

lives sinking into the soundless

white repose of ritual.