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My bell-blond doctor is short
this week again. Plainly she has
found another way to sneak one by.
Waving, she lands a boat in the howl,

cutting through a deck of cards;
dicing swift cocaine.
She scribbles off and tears,
as if from a discarded newspaper

left on a throne that has not been washed
for two weeks, a slip
for me to give my brother
among the brittle Christmas lights—

an attempt at beating heat.
She leaves me in a kitchen
where she has poured the desert
into a sandcastle and left me with a slip.