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The girls with the faux pearls
Write notes to one another:

“You are as beautiful
As life itself,”

and not meaning life,
but only the idea of it.

They are not saying
You are as beautiful as the
spilled wine beginning or the following banshee cry,
because that’s too messy and not pretty unless
it’s yours,
nor the poster-child of all nighters I have become
with the drawn banshee face, no,

Their life is the orbiting moons of Jupiter,
Which no one remembers the names of
and reflecting reflecting reflecting.

They wear angel’s fleece in bed,
in life, and wait to be culled.