Meat Eaters

They gave me a nametag and a uniform

I count coins and wonder "who will be hungry today?"

Sausage-like fingers grip thick wads of bills and sticky cards

I tap on the screen and say "seventeen dollars"

He answers me, "I'll give you seventeen if you come home with me tonight"

Since when did someone put a barcode on my forehead?

Beer breath seeps like a sewage leak

from a thousand pits, a thousand faces

spiralling into a pool of brown and black and white and gray

but it's dirty fingernails,

it's always dirty fingernails

Sometimes I find them on my shoulder

I remember nightmares of a grizzly,

when I was torn apart, licked up by a sawtooth tongue

I'm awake now but still cut into bite-size pieces

by the sharp knife of a gaze

It follows me to where there are no streetlights,

just miles of dark parking lot between me and my car