Mattress

What machine
silvers these roses
into the warp and weave
of our bed?
A horrible loom,
Kafka’s apparatus,
stitching metal sin?
A music box comb
plinking sleepy sutures
into the quilting?
Gilt flowers
automata-wrought,
visible only
when, in the twist of linen,
domesticity
has been skinned,
peeled back
to the Cartesian:
pistons of knees,
cams of thighs,
springs of sinews,
cogs of hearts.


Meghan Mullaney