In our bodies, we move uniformly.
No one owns a rickshaw tattoo
that actually clatters, hip to rib,
dust rising off the skin.
2.
Across my torso,
print a flesh-tone color tattoo
of the word Invisibility.
3.
Think of people
with their own names emblazoned
as if they might forget.
Call me anything:
alphabet braceleting one wrist.
4.
Circling an ankle: many nations' monuments.
She stepped from the bath like an giantess.
5.
An old man's arm tattoos,
green like just-before tornadoes
and the taste of anesthesia.
Once, nothing shone so brightly for him.
6.
Tattoo two lungs
and I'll return yearly
to have them darkened.
7.
How bare the body looks
around the first one.
8.
Best, for me, the flaming prophecies:
Stick Knife Here, Born to Die,
the ones redundant at autopsies:
stream of air bubbles
rising from the mermaid's red mouth
on a drowned man's palm.
(From Each Place the Body's, 2007)