Eyes are the windows to the souls
but windows are the windows to
what Victor wakes up early to

when taking out the trash. The street
stretches like a raw tendon
on a chopping block he can feel

twitching under his feet. Potluck
each morning, air thick
as blood swelling a vein: neighbors

standing naked near half-open blinds.
A quarter pound of that one, please.
The butcher wraps it in cellophane

but not tight enough: tonight
the package drips inside the fridge.
The blood forms a pool that stains.

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This poem comes from my manuscript, Victor, in which I imagine what would have become of the famous wild child of Aveyron had his acculturation occured in twenty-first-century America rather than nineteenth-century France.