Tattooed

hang the muscle limp in my arm and house my mind in other parts

of my body. My eyes shift

to flash print pirate ships, crosses, and leopards on the walls,

focus on my tattooer’s arms—

sleeved with pin-up girls and skulls, the same tats I’d seen on the Gravitron

operator in the thick of my Jersey

boardwalk childhood. A slow night so the carny climbed in the whirling

cylinder, planted his feet

into the wall, and showed me how to surf the centrifugal. My memory

is my mother’s, something she says

I’ll regret as often as not. At sixteen, she had just gotten pierced ears—

first in the family.

Her parents said she’d look like a gypsy, shiftless, and even

when they relented,

sent her to a surgeon instead of the mall where her friends went to alter

themselves. The doctor pinched

her lobes to numb them, punched lopsided holes, and opened her to infection.

In an hour I leave with bandages

saran-wrapped to my shoulder. My flesh recalls the needle

for days, strange things—

a cool breeze, a sip of whiskey, a sneeze—shock the ink to life.

When my mother passes, she wants

me to plant a lilac in her ashes, quizzes me every year to make sure

I remember. I do, but

what if I tattoo the flower’s purple and white-rim petals

on my calf and keep her

cradled in my shoe or grind her into a vial of mummy brown

like an Egyptian queen,

write this poem with her ink and then entomb the pen in a cigar box

sarcophagus? What if

I consume her powder box shadow, light a torch, and spit her

into night sky? Would that break

my promise? I wish I remembered how that carny halted

the ride from within it,

if he did—machinery spiraling him up into dust and star gleam,

the next brief stop.