Three Sketches of Anxiety

I’ve got two hands and an urge
to yank out your teeth,

my lover said, dropping the dress
she made from my shirt

to the floor, to see the landscape
a mouth of holes might look like
.

Maybe jagged potholes on a rainslick
street
, she said, climbing over

the bed. Maybe, she winked, a prairie
dog town in West Texas after a flood
.

Copyright © 2017 Curtis Bauer. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Tin House, Winter 2017.