Physiognomy

Jennifer Militello

Black animals fill the face, silhouettes, buildings fill the face, an alphabet fills the face.

Inside the face, black animals grow, they animate the data, form a demography of day, stained and soiled undershirts, they die or ask to be fed, they walk with their misshapen feet toward every kind of wild. Their hollow bells cringe against a tabernacle of idleness, the carnivores, the maggots, dogs loose from their leash. The too-white walls of them raw and exposing us like throats above the collar of a dress.

The animals are dusks remembering, their secret bodies blackening below the aftermath, their light sail lifted to gather speed.

The face grows bright with bones, and is bird-crazed, and the sculptures. Its python ribs: finger bones unnerved, finger bones predicting how the wind will empty. Its coast at last has closed its fist. Its little thistle called the mind, a hinged thing finding its options.