Her hips began the snake-dance, the spasmodic wiggle. She told me to listen closely, and her hips began hissing a slow cadence, the world losing its air, the world a depleted lunar asthmatic in need of oxygen blasts. My breath, as counterpoint, sped up and tried to mimic the accelerated tocking of her hips, their telltale sketches.

   I am bewitched and find myself lost in that story I once read about a young boy who pit-stops at a cottage in the woods during a long journey, and he is greeted at the door by a wide-hipped woman wearing a powder-stained smock, and a kerchief round her head, urging—Come in, come in.

   The smell plus sound bubbling soup drew him into the warm cozy quarters, and after a good deep exhale, he turned and saw a tit in his face, a puttied slab of matronly breast with greenish tint.

   Feed, the woman insisted, feed on this, and with a powerful grip she forced the boy’s head forward and his mouth suctioned the glacial nipple, which set off a red flag reminder—a witch’s frozen tit.

   It wasn’t long before the dark gnarling baroque vines growing out of the nipple mummified the boy, and into the soup he went, another casualty in a long line of consumptive nipple-suckers.

in the tick-tock rapture of hip-casting

the dirty little seeds

of this haunted story

came into my brain.

these hips were mother-blades

and neuron-scramblers

giving me the business.

listen to the low and slow hissing

she insisted

now it wasn’t the world

in my ears losing air

it was me

and i fell into a dark swoon

her hips turned into kinetic empire

over my prostrate ruins

her hips which seemed a million miles away

right in my face.