ladybird

She loves me she loves the knot in the hedgehog’s halter. It was their battle cry, you said, BACKWARDS, DOWNWARDS. The hog wore a purple silk cumberband encrusted in cod. Everyone was into fish those days, even the evangelists. You poured prickle into my eyes and held my land in the cup of yours. The sea was too high and too wide for your upper lip. Later, the hog kicked up hell about the purple, less so about the cod. It’s hard to take a fence over a salted fillet. You leant in, whispered about an array, said it would calm it. The waiter had FUCKU tattooed across the fingers of his right hand. In red. Upside down for those of us who weren’t him. Did he want to fuck himself? I made a mental note to ask the hog. The hog was big on skin art. You were still going on about arrays. And then shoals. For someone just out of solitary that was quite the ticket. They found the hog on an atoll, hunting babies with a butterfly net. Exported it with all the others in wooden wine crates. You demanded to know if I’d been loyal. Huh, I said. A ladybird, trapped on the waiter’s C, couldn’t get past either end of the capital.