It seemed he could not look at her enough
and it was not enough to look at her.
He stared. She screamed, she raised her arms,
her fingers fanned, her frigid breath
smoked visible before her. Solid blue,
her eyes lit up like lamps of amethyst.

She shook her stiff and clinking hair —
some icicles snapped off and burst on the pavement
tinkling shrill. Flakes flurried around her,
the quick-frozen sidewalk rifted with a crack.
In a café nearby, diners tried to sip wine
solidified in frosted glasses, chipped
yellow shards from omelet with ineffectual fork.

Armored in ice, glassily carapaced,
she brandished tongs and ice-picks in her hands.
Her eight arms waved like those of a crab on its back.
She had become a goddess, a frightful Athena
of sexual indignation, shaking her manifold
fingers at Jeff and hissing disapproval.

She slapped Jeff right in the face, and hard!
His brain-pan lid sprang open like a pocket-watch.
Gasp of air inrushing as it lifted
over exposed and living brain.

Jeff fell forward onto his knees.
His brain plumped out into his cupped palms,
the long pink spinal cord slithered around
and gripped his wrist.

He turned it over, examining the soft
pulsating thick-veined underside of brain,
like a child overturning a heavy stone
to discover a world alive with slugs
and things that quickly slither. Jeff jerked back,
squealing, appalled, at sight of brain’s
unlovely basis, the face,
if you could call it that, of dire Id,
from which the very gods avert their eyes,
abhorring.

Surging through its eyeless wet
and nasty folds, it damply opened
around a mouth, and screamed! The vile mind
drew its wet baggy bulk together,
leapt into waiting cranium,
reaching back with spinal cord
to thud the skull-cap shut behind itself.

Jeff wiped his hands against his pants,
shuddered, looked up at Sally.
She smiled. “Are you lost?” she asked,
“You look sick.”