Less lady than woman
crawls across these carpets
to the wall of windows, dirty, smeared
with last night's chocolate and cold
avocado, a crust of green still under her
one long nail. She uses it to push glass
and outside

Ohio purses bucolic lips, its idylls
blown open from lakes
to river, its pastures flat as brain waves
after a long, long drunk. She drinks
two lungsful of humid air, sweet warm,
the taste of milled paper, sour fish
and inside

the carton of last night's sweet rice,
still open, draws her hand to its portal,
its thin metal handle, the dried white beads
she ate with her fingers, all the silver
in the house having melted into coins,
all the plastic a chorus of lost tines
and outside

the wounds of Ohio lie sutured
into long gray roads across thick blue soil,
a backwash of gold
fields that she would wave her arm across
if she were in her car, driving,
if she were in her soul, a lady,
and inside