Amelia Earhart was born daughter of a stupid drunk man in the flat of Kansas and when she was a little girl she would wear flowers in her hair like orange animal’s eyes and boy’s pants on her little girl legs and her grandmother would frown at the shape of her.

Lee Harvey Oswald was born son of a dead man in the heat and breath of Louisiana and when he played cops and robbers in the back yard the game always ended with his brothers killing him with their imaginary cartoon bullets and little boy’s hands in the shape of guns.

John Wayne Gacy was born a city boy in the thick streets of Chicago and when he was a kid his father would call him junior goddamn sissy and drink and smile at his son and when he was a man he loved and murdered a soft and beautiful thirty three and called them goddamn sissies.

God was born in an old tenement on the edge of New York against the lips of coal factories and the flanks of stock yards and when the sun came up in the morning he would look out onto smoke stacks and flat faces of cows and shapes of women and men

I am the bone under city skin
dreaming the color of gasoline
and red mouthed spark—
black tire rubber tongue—
Béla Lugosi dark lipped grin
Steve McQueen cigarette lipped grin
I am the bone under city skin
orange neon jellyfish electric—
black petrol tongue—
violet mouthed—
blue eyed and yellow eyed and wire eyed—
Amelia Earhart chapped lipped grin
I am the bone under city skin