pin-up 

i want to know what
it's like to be a body threaded
into someone else's skin--
red & black ink child with the 
sewing machine sounds of a mother.
what is birth then for us? 
taut irish drum flesh
& squirm of fingers gripping 
the electric chair.
at the tattoo place i go to
specializes in pin-up girls--
they're posing all over
the walls, on their knees,
bending over, in martini glasses
& straddling fighter planes leftover
from the second great war. 
they have breasts like wooden tops--
each spinning on their chest--
on someone else's skin. i imagine
them coming awake, blinking as 
their eyes are sewn open--
the buzz of hornets. they writhe,
feeling arm hairs or leg
follicles bristling around them--
they invent a childhood in tall grass
& creek water to cope with the sensation.
they scold themselves for
giving bodies away to men-- oh how
could we let this happen? i tell
the artist that that's what i want,
to be one of them as i amble, 
pointing to different
pin-up girls around the room,
a cow-girl, a sailor, 
the girl in garter belts & lingerie. 
i say
i want to be that & 
the man who was sitting this
whole time in the lobby 
offers up his calf muscles.
it has to be a man (as we known).
the inability to observe one's own
body is liberating, becoming
a two-dimensional, brief encounters
with the mirror or the shop window.
so we grow old then, yes?
enmeshed in someone else--
i love that, the idea of 
aging with another anatomy. maybe
i invented this because i'm 
scared of loving someone like that,
or maybe it's out of solidarity 
for all the pin-up girls 
cold on bare skin in january.
if you see me though, ask the man
if you can touch me/us. 
feel the divots made by the needle,
trace me, cox me 
back to my own frame.