How to Cook a Wolf

If your mother’s like mine wanting you honeyed and blithe   

                   you’ll get cooked by getting evicted   

since the mothers can teach with a dustpan the tons of modes of tossing.

And the fathers will lift your eyes too-early-too-open:   

                   the fathers can creep up on anything when it’s still too wet   

to cloister with their weeping and strand you like a seed   

or cook at the carnivals with the can-do caroling   

                   and storefronts and foodstuffs and annulments and Scotch   

and off-handed fucking and walking out and moving on   

until they’re cooking the drift of you wanting a whole bayou up in you   

                   and cooking and cooking the gist   

of you needing your crannies hot with a good man’s body-silt   

until your head is stuffed with a pining for diapers

                   and the most minuscule spoons made mostly of silver   

and Ajax too and Minwax Oh

in this the dumbstruck story of the American female

                   as a cut of terracotta and some kindling in a dress   

while howling at the marrow of the marrow of the bone.