By Regina Cherry

Ides of March
April, the cruellest month

You were precocious.
How cold felt that gunmetal tip
against your thinning pained wrinkled lips ?
how slow, infinite eon minutes
of hesitation
reeling off life, ancestors, shtetls -- paintings ?
how hard the shaking steel on your
curled away tongue tasting
acrid -- metallic --oily ?

The crack exploding
your brain, burst
tympanums in a nanosecond
image-time travel - recoil
kicking lose a tooth,
you cut the light to the loneliest
a most definite exit not
with a whimper.

A dark crimson trickle of a stain
on your feather pillow.
What time was it ? as if that mattered
how cold were you
to your mate's touch ?
did she scream-roar with a voice
unknown to her, as
I did then twelve years before ?