Industry

She pounded her baby fists

Powerfully

Against the threshold –

Key hung like noose in pocket.

She banged so loudly that

It was almost industrious,

Like a well-shaped valium.

She built this land.

Her baby fingers rattled,

Rattled long,

Like a wired cage,

Sculpted the graphed walls into plains.

Carnivorous mortar was collected

And boarded up with nibbling nails

Like Rikers.

Like a terminal.

Her adolescent, paper walls,

Circling vulture-like,

Shivered easily

At the touch of her baby skin.

A baby woman, she crafted

The monument in ten days

And laid the plasterboard

Against a lazy partition.