when you find a small sweaty woman in your bed nervously
peeking out from behind purple velvet curtains
on the repulsion
mouth sucking finger stuck to sockets kind of definition of the word
hues of royalty, backed by an ancestral infestation 

I wondered if his feet had intentionally spelled out bed bugs
or if the pink mark on his neck was a lone third nipple

It was that I identified with that lonely protrusion
watching the other two bound along in perfect symmetry
it was I, peeking from the pinkest parts of myself
to submit to a fear of causal efficacy  bound together
by the tiny hand sandwiches I had mentioned before 

I meant ham sandwiches
like when you find that woman in a cold sweat laying face down
hoping that the man with the scissored chest won’t
drown in the puddle of her own making
She knew he would drown in something or rather

It was definitely those hand – excuse me – HAM sandwiches
she had prepared with far too much mustard
the night before when she was too preoccupied
with her secretary making prank phone calls to her
excommunicated husband that only existed on paper
so for the 100th time, she told the woman off
admitted her lies, that her husband was merely a sheaf
in which she had written down all that was necessary
to produce a slightly damp daughter that also couldn’t
distinguish between her hand or ham sandwiches
because in the end they all seemed to sound the same
especially when she read about her
excommunicated father where for some reason
all the vowels in the document had been replaced by small dots and
the d’s had somehow flown off the page
it kind of looked like this :
H-N S-NW-CH
H-M S-NW-Ch

So both mother and daughter sat in the living room
dampening the seat cushions
sweating out the overly applied spicy mustard
and hoping the secretary would never call back