Phantom Limb (v5)

[Stan]

Phantom Limb

I text your mom more
than I should—twice as much,
she swears, as her daughter ever did.
Neither of us believes in Heaven,
second chances, all that taffy people
swallow after grief, the flaccid word. It reeks
of mildewed flowers, baby’s breath, a loose thumb The severed thumb is quite violent and disrupts the 'flaccid' effect of those images a bit for me 
wrapped in drug store gauze: Sorry for your loss.
I lost my hat, I lost my phone, I lost 
my best friend. Language throws its hands up 
desperate, begs us not to shoot. We work hard
not to look it in the eyes, like putting down
a Doberman. The song you’d hum in German this is a nice addition-- why have it as one big noun phrase though? 
while her dense bulk pulled you by the rope 
past gleaming combs of beach. Does it hurt,  Because the poem isn't massively visual.. the 'gleaming combs' feel very prominent, which I'm not sure they deserve. But I thought foreshadowing the ending was a good move here 
I ask your mom, whose name To me, 
To me, 'I want to ask your mom...' Is more fitting here. Or something conditional. ‘I could ask your mom…’ I don't know if the narrator and the mom would be able to have a frank discussion.
 I do not know, when the question mark
spits out the little dot? Maybe questions are like lizards
and can let their limbs fall off at will
to get away from hawks—maybe it’s like how a fox,
caught between abrupt steel jaws, immediately
knows the only way to live
is to chew straight through the bone.
We discussed it over ossobuco
chased with thumbs of sherry. You tied a cherry stem
into a knot inside your mouth. I said
I could never—even in desperation,
who can cut off their own leg? You said I’d be
surprised. That hunger for the end of pain
could make the pain taste sweet. The dog lives
with your mother now, who says she hates the ocean.
She takes her every day. We never use your name.

I'm keen on how you’ve managed to knit together the scenes.

I think the ‘does it hurt’ and following enjambment does that well now with the addition of the Doberman yanking the friend across the beach.  
 
It makes me want to see it in the conclusion as well though— I’d like a link between the taste of the pain and the dog living with the mother. But if you wanted it as an abrupt digression, it’s all good.
 
For me, the stuff about ossobuco seems a bit on the nose compared with the rest.  But it might just be doing something different. It's also quite a specific cultural reference, which lends it emphasis again, or even disrupts the voice a bit, while the rest of the images are less rooted in that kind of particularity. I mean, for me, the voice is almost adolescent-- I can imagine the narrator being into gory things that happen to animals. It fits well with the brusque musing on the afterlife, the prosaic language 'I lost my hat, lost my phone...' and the fact the images come from quite disparate parts of life. It interrogates quite familiar cultural objects in a winsome, whimsical way 'does it hurt when the question mark spits out the little dot?', which means what could feel like mundanity actually serves a convincingly specific perspective. So I lose it a bit when it starts taking about ossobuco and sherry, but overall the voice can interrogate these kinds of themes quite well. In my opinion.