Witch Wife

by Kiki Petrosino

  I burned in my skin like a stone. How exactly?

  Where did it start? There, in the muck

  no one saw how we blazed into poppies.

  Light raked through our bellies like combs.

  We drank & I bled all the way home.

  Now, I blister up from bed. My love

  is a silver cry in the light. O animal life—

  in a city of gardens & muck, you can start

  to itch. You jostle & fight, scrambling

  for years up the hill of your life. You ask

  Where does anything start? In muck. In a garden.

  You drink the drinks & bleed. You’re foam.

  Nocturne

  After Mark Strand

  I fill my plate with rain. I fill my belly.

  I fill a T-shirt with shells & count them on the floor.

  At night, I drink juice from a moon-colored mug.

  I feed the lamp & wrap my hair in a scarf.

  What good am I doing? The ocean whines from bed.

  I take my pills. I bury watermelon seeds.

  The pills & the seeds move past each other in the dark.

  Who blesses them?

  When I slither up from sleep,

  my regrets are shreds of pulp in my mouth.

  It’s true that I love & that I do not love.

  I fill myself with my regrets & begin to speak.

  Twenty-One

  Journal, mixtape, leather coat.

  Silk scarf painted with caducei.

  Lunapark, broom flowers, ferryboat.

  Ticket stub: Autobus 25.

  Birthstone anklet, white Peugeot.

  Journal, mixtape, leather coat.

  Perseid shower, bear paw charm.

  Lunapark, broom flowers, ferryboat.

  Thumb ring, tank top, lucky coin.

  Birthstone anklet, white Peugeot.

  Pastasciutta, freckled arms.

  Perseid shower, bear paw charm.

  Campfire, windsurf, sudden wine.

  Thumb ring, tank top, lucky coin.

  Olive orchard, sunflower farm.

  Pastasciutta, freckled arms.

  Yogurt with apricots. Coca-Lite.

  Campfire, sudden wine, windsurf.

  Olive orchard, sunflower farm.

  Laundry, terrace, Sting concert.

  Feather earrings, volcano hike.

  Yogurt, apricots, Coca-Lite.

  Green-yellow sunset. Fever sleep.

  Terrace. Laundry. Sting. Sting.

  Study Abroad

  No chance you’re pregnant the English doctor asked. No chance you repeated slowly, then added No chance. That was the summer all Tuscan girls wore green cargo pants & orange camisoles. It looked one way, shopping at Esselunga, & another in the piazza with your tumbler full of strawberry liqueur & the first blue stars catapulting over the Arno. The doctor resembled a townhouse, his hair peaked narrowly in the middle. Your fingers, in their closed fists, made a subtle heat exclusive to your experience. You took the green-yellow pills, thinly coated with sweetness & punched into a paper card. Weeks later, you let your companion take you into the woods by the beach. In his family’s summer house, you broke some old chairs to feed the fire, & the stem of your body unspooled in every room. Then you slipped your long feet into the green sandals you hadn’t realized were python leather until the scales had already kinked & dulled. You will never have another pair like that. Not real python.

  Europe

  Every night, I go back to your house

  behind the abandoned caserma, where once

  I wept in my clothes on the street.

  Your same window with its rolling blinds.

  Same diesel smell. Same birds on the roof.

  Every night, I go back to your house.

  I almost dissolved when you sank

  your verbs in white ink: imperfect, subjunctive.

  I wept in my clothes on the street

  where olive trees turned their foil palms.

  It was summer. I stood in my smithereens.

  Every night, I go back to your house

  climbing your melted marble steps. My age

  is a seed-pearl under my tongue. Was I wrong

  to weep in my clothes on the street?

  Your lamps are still. Your mother is home.

  I’ll never be so lonely again, or young enough

  to weep in my clothes on the street.

  Every night, I go back to your house.

  Why Don’t You Wear a Black Crepe Glove Embroidered in Gold, Like the Hand That Bore a Falcon?

  You are describing how the transparent oval of my face seems to hang before you in the seconds before sleep. I peel off my gloves to eat from your paper cone of burning chestnuts even though they taste like bugs to me. You buy the chestnuts because you want me to enjoy this trip but then never to come back, not to your bedroom where I left my footprint in lotion on the hardwood, not to sit with you before your mother’s scant bowls of pastina in brodo. We pass the newsstand next to the bakery next to the bus stop by the restaurant that used to be an orphanage. You’re still talking about my phantom face, about the white light which, you say, surges into a beautiful tree-shape on top of my head. The clarity of this light magnetized your soul, or perhaps your soul already contained the exact spinning glob of sweetness that matched my own. It would be wrong to say precisely, it would be wrong to remember in any particular fashion. Our futures float by in their clear bulbs of breath, & I tell you the story again.

  Break-Up-A-Thalamion

  You don’t share

  your scones with me anymore

  even though you said

  I’d have all your buon

  sostegno per sempre.

  I don’t care

  for your bakery smug.

  I’m crying you out.

  My tears are cold cubes

  springing off my face

  like cartoons.

  Hey.

  You’re a punch

  in the head. Nobody

  will tell you so

  but me.

  Let Me Tell You People Something

  The women in my country, they are going into the yard with pots & spoons to bang at crows. Always, this. Because crows will eat every fruit from the trees, & then? Nothing left. So the women bang, they yell in a big voice every morning. But crow is not afraid of woman, it will come back tomorrow. Crow is like, you bring pot & spoon? I do not care. You know, do not care? Tomorrow, maybe, you leave this city. You take just one small box or one small case, fly to another house, put your box on the floor & ask: this box, who is it? Who lives in my house? You are forgetting all the time. I have seen you, wearing the name of your city on the T-shirts. Every name more huge, lying across the chest like a creature. Always, you complain in your small clothes. You complain when the rain is not stopping, but also: no rain. This complaining you do? Is just the ghost of the house you leave for another house. You don’t remember. But. In my country, we take the young asparagus in March when it walks on the hills. Asparagus is like the persons we have loved, standing in the house of our parents. I am living here for many years now, but I do not forget my mother in the yard. My sister with her spoon. I do not weep in your way of ghosts. That’s all.

  Political Poem

  The country is not what it was. I miss the arc of

  green fireworks in spring & the moral

  bellies of lake trout rolled in flour. This universe is

  so dry, star-sharp. Each day, my arms grow long but

  never reach the freedom shore. The line of it bends

  like a fern in rain. Birds chatter towards justice

  towards justice towards justice towards justice—

  Their beaks click together like dolls. I study the arc of

  my own slithering chin as it bends

  along the waterway of my phone. The moral

  is a glass canoe lodged in a long but

  finite block of news. I say: This universe is

 
; not worth my heard-earned glitter. This universe is

  not what I dreamed. Wings careen in the blue, towards justice

  but I watch from the dirt, my feet burning. I long, but

  I can’t measure my longing, can’t trace the arc of

  my tears as they depart from my head. Now the moral

  autobus kneels like a camel at the curb. It bends

  & I climb into the sinking dark. I climb. It bends.

  This forced union is not what I’ve loved. What’s a universe?

  A tingle up my leg. The stars. Once, I dreamed a moral

  constellation of strawberry seeds, arranged towards justice.

  But I don’t know how to read stars, the arc of

  federal dust that governs me. My body is long, but

  not quite free. I go along, I get along, but

  I’m not quite free. My sweet, harmless body, it bends

  so you can’t identify my color, just the arc of

  my spine, which could be anyone’s, in the cool universes

  of love. So let my body move towards justice

  & away from countries. Let it curl up like the moral

  fortune still inside the cookie, the moral

  border dissolving in cold milk. Won’t be long.

  Will everything we know collapse towards justice?

  Bodies, berries, beaks, barns—will all of it bend

  & wash under the moon? It feels like this universe is

  someone else’s calculus, the arc of

  a moonbeam in the moral firmament. It bends

  & the light is long, but dimming. Such universes.

  Here, I draw the arc of two words: just is.

  Afterlife

  My exes shall rise up from their Mazdas

  & adorn themselves in denim.

  I’ll take their hands & we’ll wander

  among the silver asparagus.

  Though all are present, it seems to each

  that I’m walking with him only.

  One brings me five white roses again

  petals curling in soft paper.

  Another comes with a mixtape & drawings:

  heart, suitcase, shape of his country.

  We’ll sit at the stone table & eat

  from the same jar of strawberries & mint.

  Each will tell about his wife. The golden hikes

  they take after lunch with their dogs.

  I’ll show them my books & the healed mark

  over my ribcage.

  We’ll enter the cottage where our babies sleep

  forever in their small beds.

  I’ll hum to them in many voices until just

  one brightness occurs.

  Then I’ll go alone to the curve of the lake

  to see what will jump for me.

  Estival

  When the arms of the larkspur dial open

  it’s only natural to want to dissolve. In the glinting haze

  you have nothing to do but keep moving

  inward. Here’s your realm of green sepals, tall

  as knights. Your calyx sharpens over a dominion of seeds.

  When the arms of the larkspur dial open

  draw your wedding ring in mulch. Don’t stand

  around too long. Since all parts of the larkspur are toxic

  you have nothing to do. Keep moving

  with patience over the hooks & buttons of sun.

  July is an alkaloid tongue, sunk in botanical Latin.

  But when the arms of the larkspur dial open

  you can learn to climb. All the way up

  to the silent blue beak at the top of your thought.

  There’s nothing to do but keep moving

  hand over hand. Time widens, just like your body

  sealed shut in the light. An inner world hums

  as the arms of the larkspur dial open.

  There’s nothing for you here. Move on.

  Doubloon Oath

  By dead gal or stove bones

  by rainbow or red bird

  red bird or cracked spine

  by silk wrap or jaw jaw

  by cold bodice, blush wing

  tick tick or sunk ship

  by tipped arrow, glass bite

  by weird catch or take that

  by chopped mountain, slick house

  boatneck or gloss hog

  striped awning, gold lawn

  by what’s that or so much

  without me or full prof

  full prof or nunchucks

  blood orange, brain gob

  time kill or toy star

  by black doll or briar thorn

  beg beg or gewgaw

  by sweetmeat, or gunlock

  or old maid or dreadnought

  by weakness or whitecap

  or grief-bacon, worksong

  by fieldwork or field mix

  slagged field or steel kilt

  by bone-bruise or kneesock

  I get my gift.

  Three

  I Married a Horseman

  for his straight jaw & dark jackets.

  For he gave me his ring to wear as a cinch.

  My markings, he called faint star, white boot

  & drew a line of rain

  down the side of my cheek. I married him

  for the silence in his speech, for

  his black kerchief. All the time

  he drew & in this drawing, we married.

  Now I live in the timber scent & tall

  smoke of his shadow. Evenings, he returns

  to me from his work, with his fine coat

  haltered in frost. This house

  has no doors. We pass each other

  crossing our necks in Hello.

  Ghosts

  After Anne Sexton

  Some ghosts are my mothers

  neither angry nor kind

  their hair blooming from silk kerchiefs.

  Not queens, but ghosts

  who hum down the hall on their curved fins

  sad as seahorses.

  Not all ghosts are mothers.

  I’ve counted them as I walk the beach.

  Some are herons wearing the moonrise like lace.

  Not lonely, but ghostly.

  They stalk the low tidepools, flexing

  their brassy beaks, their eyes.

  But that isn’t all.

  Some of my ghosts are planets.

  Not bright. Not young.

  Spiraling deep in the dusk of my body

  as saucers or moons

  pleased with their belts of colored dust

  & hailing no others.

  Witch Wife

  I’ll conjure the perfect Easter

  & we’ll plant mini spruces in the yard—

  my pink gloves & your green gloves

  like parrots from an opera over the earth—

  We’ll chatter about our enemies’ spectacular deaths.

  I’ll conjure the perfect Easter

  dark pesto sauce sealed with lemon

  long cords of fusilli to remind you of my hair

  & my pink gloves. Your gloves are green

  & transparent like the skin of Christ

  when He returned, filmed over with moss roses—

  I’ll conjure as perfect an Easter:

  provolone cut from the whole ball

  woody herbs burning our tongues—it’s a holiday

  I conjure with my pink-and-green gloves

  wrangling life from the dirt. It all turns out

  as I’d hoped. The warlocks of winter are dead

  & it’s Easter. I dig up body after body after body

  with my pink gloves, my green gloves.

  Lament

  I’ve lost something, an argument.

  Even our rickshaw-wallah knows

  & the women in jeweled sandals palming clear

  lumps of jaggery. They do not squint

  as we pass, but they can hear my buzz & bicker

  pressed tight with you on th
is bench seat where dozens

  of hot vinyl hearts brand the backs of my legs.

  I think of the NyQuil I should’ve packed for us—

  rainbow lake of sleep we could’ve sipped—

  if I’d been a clever wife

  if I’d heeded the cough & achoo of that guy

  on the flight over from Newark.

  I tell you We got punished, this is punishment

  & I mean it with steam, as that father & son

  rake yards of soaked cotton from their dye vats

  sweat rolling down their noses, exact.

  If I were sweeter, didn’t boil with panic

  I could’ve charmed the doctor into charging us less

  for your X-rays & your ultrasound

  for your glucose sticks & liver panels.

  The second day of your fever, he complimented my arms

  black with new henna & promised

  you’d improve before they faded. He called

  me Madame & I think I could’ve haggled.

  Today there’s no doubt about the itch

  trailing its thin flag across my throat

  or the translucent goo I honked into the sink

  this morning. I’ve got what you’ve got, husband:

  your white shirt, sweated through to the skin

  your watery eyes & snow-cold hands. I do.

  Vigil

  You ask what I’m not a liar about. It’s dark.

  From bed, we watch some passing headlights rake

  the windows back. I tell you how I see myself: alone

  with my guitar, strappy heels, a bit of sweet pea

  twisted through my hair. But my fingers slide right off

  the strings I say, pulling up the covers. They just

  won’t move at all. By now, you’ve spun deep into the quilt.

  Your arms are gone. I’m telling you the truth I say

  about the guitar. I’m sitting up now. Almost, I can feel

  the lacquered wood against my chest, a resonance

  of thrumming spruce. You stir, then clock

  the space between my hands. There’s nothing there

  you sigh. Why make things up? So I look again.

  Left arm, right arm: crescented. There’s something here