st. hammer's grotto

She sold day-old hands and Mariner's Brew
Pulling the needle through the camel and the old switcheroo
She had a pig-eyed great aunt she'd visit once a week
With a tumbrel that took up the whole street
She'd collect how-to books that people had left
She was never bereaved but always bereft

She invented presidents and put them on counterfeit money
And she thought everything was funny
She never ate meat but it was all she could cook
Her own signature filled up her autograph book
She made friends with the furniture and sat on the floor
And wrote travel guides to places she'd never been to before

She had a face like a brick angel and eyes like the bottom of a Burmese tiger pit
She could finish a whole cake and a bucket of warm wine in one sit
And she had a mind like a trap made of angry brass and knotted wood
The front door of her house was a modified Studebaker hood
And she used to bottle ground-up leaves and tell children they were her boyfriends' ashes
And she made up names for made-up rashes

She wrote stories that all ended the same way
With the good guy turning bad and then getting away
She hammered things for fun and sometimes for music
She knew sign language but not how to use it
And she hung up boards of expensive wood with oil-painted frames
But for the life of me I can't remember her name