She Saw An Eel

and it made her sick.
Sick and limply violent.
She wanted to put it in her mouth,
wanted to see how bad it could be.

"Quit that," he told her
and she stopped making her face.
She wrote E-E-L
on her palette with her tongue.


(originally published in the literary journal Tyounyi, New Mexico [1989] and reprinted in Slack magazine, Boulder, Colorado [1993])