Some women master mirrors in gas stations
and motel rooms: painting smiles to charm
the night, learn to get by when July
deepens on fastbreath, or uncertain hands.

They count tips in Denny's, lying themselves
into poetry, blending into the pavement of
pigeon shit gray— elegy clinging to pores
like perspiration.

The ash-tray girls, their bodies: tree
stumps in mud, fashioned in the light of
sour milk, they buy French sleepers to
weep in, whisper abandonment, and carry
love, light like a wafer on the tongue.

They pick up pennies, study them for signs
of age, see months become smoke in still
rooms along the back streets of Eden.

Ladies, hardened to glass, who lose children
in supermarkets, sink into the cold, as minutes
become urgent, and everything is counted, like
meter money, like days that pass.