Terrible Blooms

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by Melissa Stein


  Ardor

  When we woke up the roses

  had all been trampled, blowsy

  froth and armored stalks,

  and we stood there in

  the weighted morning air

  wringing our hands. Nevertheless

  there was something magnetic

  in the slightly wavering complexion

  of where they once stood,

  in the ground now ornamented

  with expensively calibrated

  color crushed and shredded.

  Oh to borrow for just an hour

  in this tediously agnostic

  circumambulation such divine

  conviction: to move through

  this world as a pillar of fire,

  an immaculate decimation—

  Powder

  i. O

  Some blade wedged

  in. A tongue of meat

  and all the marvel of opening

  what needs stay clamped

  to live. That was me, twitching

  on a tine, acid-stung

  and gulped for taste

  and to a powder

  ground what’s left:

  nacre. Dumbest chalk.

  ii. Puff

  Vervain, sandalwood, white

  mint. Purses, silk-lined,

  and a tablet of soap.

  Pearl mirror, such spectacle

  and opiate. Fur puff

  to dip the powder out. Disease

  so exquisite it staggers

  the days into glorious

  mourning: that all the rest

  weren’t just like this.

  iii. Quinsy

  Bone-ache, hot. Steeped

  muslin. Throat veiled

  to pulp, such web, rhubarb

  asphyxiate, something

  delivered on a spoon

  or in a net. All hail

  this packet of xanthine,

  powdered quease. Stopper

  the heart-fist in its own

  gone syrup. Quinsy-

  sweet, that clot.

  Barometric

  That weight—

  a magnet. Sodden clouds

  pressing down everything.

  Sphagnum, gypsum, pearl

  iterations. Obsidian. Sphalerite.

  The woman kneeling on her pain

  in the garden, weeding. The woman

  sliding into cedar water. The one

  collapsed among the ferns

  and wild mint. Pentagonal

  beetle, carnelian and jade

  stuttering in her hair

  with all five limbs.

  Jigsaw

  I asked a soldier about the camouflage

  and he said nothing. Kiss that soldier,

  place your hand over his heart.

  He has been reinserted with missing

  pieces and extra pieces. Such

  graffiti and noise. Jigsaw

  this soldier. Out in the field,

  wheat, and in the wheat, weevils.

  A helicopter lands in a field

  of soldiers wavering like—

  These mines dismantle metaphors.

  These soldiers have eaten

  the flag. Give them engines,

  watch their childhoods fall away.

  Never said

  the fawns had leapt the fence

  into the mountain lion’s maw

  or that the falcon arrowed past,

  a vole pierced in its talons,

  releasing the most wrenching

  cry. I said I cared for you

  and had for a long time. Not

  that the shoulder of the wolf

  was broken when she fell

  from the ravine and her pack

  began to shy away. That the sundew

  had caught the damselfly

  in its sticky pearls and it was

  lose a leg or die. I simply said

  in slanting evening light

  I’d like to have a child.

  Jealous

  in the jaw: wire me

  shut so I can bite

  back what I said:

  our peace collapsed

  as peaches rot and sink—

  sweet rot, takes hold

  a spot then grows it—

  that’s what I meant,

  a piece of meat gone

  soft and sweeter: sunk

  into what was: our truce

  grew frizz like mold,

  velvet-blue I nevertheless

  ate—intook—accord

  so fraught—it tastes—

  here, look. The clabbered

  skin split. I’ll bite,

  you’ll snarl, we’ll part

  for good. Let’s

  leave. The wasps,

  they’ll pick clean

  what we wrought.

  Vertical

  I spun around

  to lose my bearings.

  Not a single bird sang.

  Not a single word

  through leaves

  to tell me where I was.

  I picked my way

  through moss and fern

  and mushrooms

  of a thousand kinds,

  some kicked over

  and tenderly white,

  those gills. They

  hurt. So many things

  here pitched and

  fallen in. Kindred.

  I could plant myself

  on a stump and let it.

  How deliciously quiet

  my feet to mulch

  my hands, my throat,

  and thought.

  Some seed blow past

  and root, or root

  elsewhere in other rot

  feeding all that

  aching vertical.

  Quarry

  A girl is swimming naked

  in dark water. She doesn’t see herself

  as graceful but the water tells otherwise,

  the way it loosens and strikes

  and burnishes. Exposed

  ledges, rock’s crumble on surfaces

  and the surface of the water broken

  by her body, marine and white.

  There is also a freckled boy

  contained in his body’s wish

  to outstrip but for now

  mere stripling, too slight

  for the shoulders and limbs

  that pummel and thrash

  to make himself bigger.

  The girl and boy

  pinwheel in the water

  and do not touch

  but are connected

  by invisible currents

  their bodies manufacture.

  Her eyes are closed

  but she knows where he is,

  diving from the turtle rock

  a little clumsily, the muscles

  like lozenges

  in his thin legs twitching

  as they push off.

  Days of this. Weeks.

  Then, detaching itself from

  sun, water, blasted rock

  another body comes,

  a grown man, all smiles

  and cigarettes

  and offering. I still dream

  that the red-haired boy held my head

  under water

  to spare me what the man did.

  This house

  The storm tore through us

  like a child’s graphite scraping

  at the white page until

  there is no white,

  no page. Now the earth

  is sea. It churns up

  all that’s buried, all that’s free.

  There is no holding it.

  So we hold each other

  and rock, and rock.

  I always thought

  at the end of everything

  there would be something.

  But I’ve already let it go.

  Milk

  The nurse has made up the bed so crisply.

  Tucked the corners’ origami

/>   soundly into the aluminum frame.

  Your lips glisten, moistened with a square

  of sponge. I hold your hand—weightless

  thing of parchment and twig—

  no more your daughter than a seed

  cast from hoof-split rattlegrass, no more than

  an asterisk sprung from thistle, caught, wished upon,

  let go. I inhale the antiseptic scent of bay,

  of balsam. Rooted here, in this cheap plastic chair,

  as if I’ll miss something,

  as if my missing it would matter.

  Just as—branch-snap to feeding deer, wing-shadow

  to the scuttling mouse—it has always mattered.

  The window frames a square of light

  white and blameless as milk. I turn from you

  and drink, and drink, and drink.

  Slap

  I want to write my lover a poem

  but a very bad one. It’ll include

  a giant squid and some loose change

  and cuff links and two blue ferries chugging

  headfirst on the East River at twenty-six knots

  and only at the last minute averting

  disaster through quick thinking and sure reflexes. Also

  a bow and arrow and glossy red apple

  I perch in front of my heart. To be honest

  my lover doesn’t really like poetry,

  which I guess is why I plan to write

  such a bad one, so he can feel right

  and strong and good in his beliefs.

  Tonight when I go see my lover

  he’ll hold me as I’ve never been held

  except by him and then I’ll have to give him

  back. When you get new things

  you treat them like glass for a while

  and then get used to them

  and manhandle them

  like everything else.

  I don’t want to give him back

  but partly it’s not up to me

  and partly I don’t want to be his

  old sofa. I want to radiate and gleam

  arrestingly until the certain, premature

  end. You can compose a whole life

  out of these rollercoasters.

  You can be everywhere

  and nowhere, over and over

  life slapping you in the face

  till you’re newly burnished

  flat-out gasping and awake.

  Wormhole

  In Hazardville

  between Enfield and Springfield

  near the state line

  near the Basketball Hall of Fame

  shaped like a giant basketball—

  in a hotel room increasingly seamy,

  you are fucking the one you want most

  and have wanted always

  and there’s no one to fantasize about

  because you’re staring your actual fantasy in the face

  doing every single thing you’ve fantasized

  and it’s like some wormhole opens

  or black hole who can keep them straight

  or maybe a giant earthquake or volcano

  but really more like a cosmic event tearing

  open the very fabric of the universe

  like in some episode of Star Trek

  and that’s what it’s like also to come at the same time

  because that never happens either,

  your cries interlapping like sine waves

  or actual waves of two enormous oceans

  folding over one another, capsizing

  the space-time continuum

  that dictates even if you get what you long for most

  some odds-annihilating occasion

  you won’t enjoy it anyway

  because you’ll be in your own fucking

  head the whole time thinking

  how you’d damn well better enjoy it—

  but this one time, this one

  staggering time, you manage it,

  you together are glorious,

  and somehow outside that improbable

  epicenter you’ll leave

  a huge cleaning tip for

  the world ticks on,

  sans apocalypse,

  the universe apparently

  large enough to contain

  even this.

  [ iv ]

  Rapture

  I once turned to swan

  in the post-office line, the people

  waning there with their parcels

  and address stickers oblivious

  to the enormity and genius

  of my wings. Imagine a white

  white enough, a tender

  tender enough to suffuse you

  to a child’s sleep

  right on your weary feet?

  But the ledgers and the pencils

  and the stamps. The daily adhesive.

  The bruise and bruise and bruise.

  Take heart, oh beautiful people

  of the post-office line. I hereby

  lend you my ascension.

  In my numb and glorious

  profusion I enfold you

  and your piglet grief.

  Clerestory

  By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.

  I survived that voltage and barbed wire.

  Now each day is clerestory,

  each night a palimpsest of scars.

  The militia pulls on its boots and waits.

  On the altars, doves peck each other bloody.

  A spider traverses its unseen wire

  in the rarefied ether of the clerestory.

  He told me it wouldn’t scar

  if I rubbed salt in it. Wait

  for the psalm to surface in the blood.

  Close behind is the conquering army.

  A trapped dove crashes through the clerestory,

  a bewildered militia of scars.

  I strip the insulation and wait

  for ignition: for sweet oil to bloody

  the engine. Too late. He’s left me

  behind, a shipwreck of transept and wire—

  you will know me by the scars.

  By the crowned and pulsing weight

  of every lost and bloodied

  thing. Gilded and radiant is the enemy.

  His last message traveled the wire

  and vanished. God-blind is the clerestory.

  All that’s left is to hide and wait

  for the report of jackboots in a forest of blood.

  To some, it is a symphony.

  We collect feathers and bind them with wire

  and twine. These wings are our clerestory.

  The engine stalled, that metal body scarred

  the rails, and in its wake, the blood

  bearing its testimony.

  The bodies dragged. The shallow graves, the fire.

  Who stabbed out the windows of the clerestory?

  What will annihilate these scars?

  The immaculate landmines wait.

  We are bound by blood to our enemy

  while God feeds stars to his clerestory.

  Why aren’t they detonated? The whole world waits.

  Masochist

  We were listening to the song

  about the boy who keeps losing

  limbs and the girl who loves him

  anyway ’cause she’s

  a masochist. In this way

  they’re meant to be.

  I’m going to talk now

  about groundhogs

  and how they galumph

  across the sunny lawns

  of our childhoods. I’m tired

  of disfigurement.

  Tired of the mirror.

  Of the red tail

  and the shriek

  and the arrows piercing the sides

  of the groundhog

  and lifting. Even

  of the lifting.

  Ring

  Control was all

  I wanted: a
handle

  on the day, the night

  when it curved,

  when it swayed,

  when I could sense

  the teeming stars

  in light, in dark

  the sun’s bare wire.

  Some switch

  to turn it off:

  each shadow

  pinned to each tree

  like a radius

  of infant’s

  milk it spilled.

  And the leaves,

  their gossip

  of claw and beak

  and wind and heat

  and wing. Tether

  lake to bank and

  cloud to peak.

  And weather it.

  All this to say I’ve

  taken off my ring.

  Hive

  In the night, fear’s stepchild: all hail

  the ticking brain. And ash in the fireplace

  and in the stove. What am I doing with these

  old-woman hands? They don’t belong to me.

  There was one perfect moment of détente

  where you called me the love of your life

  but you were stoned and possibly on pills.

  Your touch, iambic, when we met

  and the rest, sheeted mirrors and grief.

  Next door they’re perpetually building a house

  of schadenfreude and light. They’re draping it

  in butter-yellow paint. The bees will take up

  residence. There’s honey in the paint.

  Bind

  He had no idea

  what I constructed for us

  in the dark

  how my head bent down

  or tipped back,

  what ugly words I made of it.

  There was a tree

 

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