kitchen poem #2

watching the boil creep 

across a slick and unfitted river—

the black pulses, white noise,

dried beans caught, roiling—

I worry I will have missed a step,

in the end,

that they will neither soften nor cook.

intuition is fear / proven right.

I bear that taut, mealy bean,

my teeth grinding into premonition,

the taste reedy and small—

I pull handfuls of muddy unsuccess

out of the still-hot water

and eat the whole ruined batch,

willing myself to choke.

LOVE RECRUDESCENT

since the violation

my nightmares have all

included the threat

or the reality

of immobility

and I am there,

body pooling around me,

held down, useless.

wake: now I am here,

next to a plenitude

of gentleness,

unafraid. the humidity

of shared breath,

the safety of control:

call me a jar

of consent.

you draw nazca lines

at the entrance

to a lush forest 

shaped like hummingbird,

or shifting coccoon—you

remove the ruddy

pebbled blush

to reveal what’s under.

a religious act.

give those lines

a purpose. give them

clarity without hesitation.

we should try,

you said,

everything, just to see

what you like best.

Goretti Girls get their man, Oct. 2003

Every day, for weeks, we’d seen

pink heritable flesh, a shock

of sickly invertebrate underbelly extended,

engorged. The fat meat turned uglier

and redder by the second, fevered, swelling—

an unwanted inheritance come too early,

a sight we neither asked for nor wanted,

not yet. Me and the other girls trooped down

from St. Maria Goretti, down in South Philly,

wearing modest knee-length plaid

and starchy white shirts, suspicious and tense.

We kept together on the walk home from school,

schools of nervous trout avoiding

an ugly red worm—bait—from a crooked hook.

Yesterday, though, sick of the taunt, the show

and the fear, we became fearless. We moved

together when we spotted him—not away,

but closer. Kell dropped her bag like it was full

of heavy sea-stones and sped toward him,

little legs pumping under ugly grey-patterned

war skirt, to deliver the first blow, a firm kick.

Red algae bloomed where her foot landed.

The nasty worm shrank and receded to useless

pulpy flaccidity, like an empty sock. Me and the girls

kept kicking, 'cause we really wanted him to know

how much we never wanted to see what he offered.

Fish move together since they know 

that to present a united front is wise. It’s better

for the whole group. It’s easier to defend
when there’s lots of you. It’s easier to attack, too. 

Goretti Girls v 2

Every day, for weeks, we’d seen

pink heritable flesh revealed, a shock

of sickly invertebrate underbelly extended,

engorged. The fat meat turned uglier

and redder by the second, fevered, swelling—

an unwanted inheritance come too early,

a sight we neither asked for nor wanted,

not yet. Me and the other girls trooped down

from St. Maria Goretti, down in South Philly,

wearing modest knee-length plaid

and starchy white shirts, suspicious and tense.

We kept together on the walk home from school,

schools of nervous trout avoiding

an ugly red worm—bait—from a crooked hook.

Yesterday, though, sick of the taunt, the show

and the fear, we became fearless. We moved

together when we spotted him—not away,

but closer. Kell dropped her bag like it was full

of heavy sea-stones and sped toward him,

little legs pumping under ugly grey-patterned

war skirt, to deliver the first blow, a firm kick.

Red algae bloomed where her foot landed.

The nasty worm shrank and receded to useless

pulpy flaccidity, like an empty sock. 
Me and the girls kept kicking.

Fish move together since they know 

that to present a united front is wise. It’s better

for the whole group. It’s easier to defend
when there’s lots of you. It’s easier to attack, too. 

Enter Smiling Carolyn Bessette

after “Another Day” by Stephen Dunn

1.

Girl as pioneer: she fits the bill perfectly, she is fresher

than the unbidden moon, which has followed her to this

collection of roundness, a hyper-elegant orchard devoid

of laughter or insight or real fruit. She nightmares, fitful,

throws a fit, is nightmarish. Carolyn charms, sells,

and rescinds the charm—she has held your emotions hostage,

torture named desire, the succubus that invades sanctuary.

When the moon rises in the early evening, she is there to bite.

2.

In Wyoming, or some other great midwestern state

where Caro never studied being social or shouted in a park,

some untamed mare snorts canyon dust, while elsewhere

near Camelot another dust is prepared by a tall palamino.

She experiences no crises of faith, because faith is found

only in dressing rooms, ballrooms, any crowded room

where she might revise the persona—ars simulacro—

and hook another easy-catch trout peeking from the river.

She tinkers, dawdles, strays, commands. No man keeps her.

3.

After the aircraft accident, she lived in the conditional—

would have, should have. Charm is a sort of magic,

devil-sent to punish the soft pioneer, for allowing herself to be

kept, tethered by a man, hooked the way she had hooked

unapologetically. Her grounding was caused by spatial

disorientation, bitten moon charming the pilot and drowning

the succubus, who was tied to the plane seat to watch

Icarus her husband fly too close to the devastating moon.

the final frontier

when we passed through the mountains of utah,

strange, looming, repressive, dark,

so dark even the lights of the highway

and the yawning, dizzying swallowing

of galaxies too visible, too accessible—

even these million lights could not touch

the gaping pressurized darkness

of that unfamiliar landscape,

so dark it absorbed the light of his voice,

so dark I could not be reassured

when we passed through the mountains of utah,

full of invisible beasts, brutes, fiends and foes,

crudely built, unidentified by science,

like a new, harsh planet where the natives

aren’t friendly, I was sure they were mean—

I mean malicious; I mean inferior; I mean

starving—just the shadow of that potential

was enough to convince me of their reality,

their cruelty, their intentions toward me

and their superior tracking abilities.

when we passed through the mountains of utah,

rocks stacked by some old,

unseen hand, rocks stacked unnaturally,

at least for what I knew, too geometric,

too jagged, too intentional,

and far too tall, like little elevators to space,

shapes on shapes, rectangles that touch and negate—

when we passed through the mountains of utah,

I had a panic attack that lasted thirteen minutes.

a memory:

I did not kiss you when you came to pick me up, nor once during the drive. I had kissed you when we finally parked, as I was preparing to pull my things from the backseat. I kissed you like I loved you.

your sweat drips onto my face. there is no space between us. your room is hot, the sun is high, your roommate is gone. we have made love once already. 

this time it is slow: it is too humid and we are too lazy to do much but move against each other. the sex, as always, is good. your head is on my shoulder and I cup it with a loving hand.

you lean up. blink. your eyebrows are so high that your forehead looks crumpled and foreign. your face is red. shuddering, you manage a smile and it looks like you love me.

we are making love, and alone I will come to this memory for months afterwards. we make a thousand thousand new ones but this first instance, full of love, is precious.

gentle, concerned, strong,

never careful, no hesitation--

the main event, as promised.

my body on yours was not new,

but only barely; weeks of touch,

of kiss, of reassessing and

turning friend into lover.

you pressed me into the bed--

smiled, wicked and sharp--

and said, "we should try

everything, just to see

what you like best," and I knew

that I was totally fucked.

LOVE RECRUDESCENT

The Bull (revised)

The body that holds me: four walls,

more, ambitiously conceived

like the monster it was created to hold;

corpse to house the bastard of a cursed wife.

Sins of the stepfather ensured a body

large and wrong, born as a vessel

to hold his guilt. Stupid beast,

with horns for gouging and hands

for grasping like the most helpless of babes.

No mother’s milk, only meat hoarding marrow

like gold in loose soil, and to that end,

I crack the bones and explore the bounty:

Paths unnavigable but by a ball of twine,

impossible, lonely halls carrying blood.

I walk between the ribs of my cage,

and await a hero who seeks my taurine head,

my human heart. Do not be cowed, hero—

I am branded brute, but I am less than a man.