Gwen and God’s Holepunch

The boyfriend talks talks gesticulates

over the ghosting dinnerplate, through the ghost's

innards he natters, and the red wine tocks

quietly in its glass as vastly as a timebomb,

the cat chirps and paws the chairlegs,

and KA CHUNK God's giant holepunch

descends as the sky rolls back—as a scroll—

(as a scroll) biting Gwen through the sternum

as cheaply, as easily, as a sheet of paper.

Now whenever they make love his sweat

rains through the hole onto the sheet,

and the sunset glares through the hole

making of Gwen an aperture, a flashlight,

shining all over how empty Gwen is—

you can see right through her, flimsy Gwensy,

it is embarrassing, like being topless

in a department store. But this isn't a dream

common or otherwise, and no shirt Gwen steals

can conceal the hole, neither round nor square

peg fits in it. It seems to Gwen as if God's holepunch

has taken the central phrase from every document:

the glazed and backlit sky, the ocean's measureless womb,

the great fatrolls of the earth bunched up into mountains,

the underworld with its sickly, sightless denizens,

all gutted, illegible because partial, always sliding

out of sense into senseless, into empty, into void.