Christ’s wound is the open mouth
of the grinning face emoji, lips
dripping Smucker’s red raspberry jam.
In the tale of Nastagio degli Onesti,
marriage meant a knight hunting
the ungrateful woman, hounds
nipping her thighs until he flung
her heart to their waiting teeth.
The punishment repeated each Friday.
Like Saint Michael slaying Lucifer
ad nauseum, the action becomes
a monster itself, a kaleidoscope
gone awry, early ’90s Magic Eye.
Aventurine lends the adoration
of shepherds a glittering backdrop
as old ladies’ swollen feet press
against leather sandals on Spanish
streets, thyroids like pelicans’ gullets
spitting phlegm over concrete.
One night, I dreamed my skin peeled
away, shedding a sunburnt chrysalis
on our bedding, never fully drying
in this humidity. The peppery scent
of the botanical gardens mixed
with the tree-of-heaven’s semen
stink, and followed us to the subway
like piss-dripping bags of garbage.
THE WAY
If the forest opened itself to me,
how deeply would I follow it inside?
Or if you dropped pebbles to follow,
would I allow you to invite me in,
to enter your home, to use the toilet,
let me be enwrapped in a stranger’s arms?
Nearly two minutes in, I remembered
I’d forgotten about rape, mislaid
the notion of fear, prompted by the man
clad in Lycra shorts jogging toward me,
body sweat a glaze. His gaze surveyed me.
Distant beasts brayed to the rhythm of his
ample breathing. I found my SMS
wouldn’t send. So if I fell surrounded
by trees and Nature – so be it – released
of physical being I felt it all: fear, lust,
a body weighed down with plastic beads,
whose shadow flitted past hickory.
The matter was taken from me, a child’s,
and seized. I embraced my slumping to see
where the unfamiliar posture would lead.
A pale cicada curled at my feet.
I imagined the life I still wanted:
my cursor blinking on a dizzied screen.
In a world that’s mainly insects, did I move
in it too heavily? I fished a fly
from a cobweb and it flew into me,
squandered freedom colliding with atoms
as we all do. In the forest’s gentle clearing,
a dog-walker found me wandering
and helped me find the way. We looked
over the graveyard and each blotch she read
on my face she saw as brush strokes – not wings.
I turned back at the cemetery’s gate,
and lost myself in the forest again.
TO FIND A GHOST FOREST
Search first for traces of charcoal
blackening the pathway, trees felled
for fuel where livestock once grazed.
Unearth clues obscured in old maps
and estate records, spectres of shadow
woods archived in the king’s Domesday.
The phantoms cling to honeysuckle,
holly, common cow-wheat, haunting
hacked-off limbs of coppiced trees.
Bluebells mark woodland turned
to pasture, a ring of hanging heads
announcing the forest’s neat graves.
GHOSTING
If I wear enough concealer
will I disappear completely,
blend in with the mirrors,
assume a new personality?
I saw a real-life mummy
and put its JPEG on my laptop screen.
Now my computer’s haunted,
a MacBook-of-the-dead
whose powers and spells
I’ll harness to guide me.
Give me the strength, Lindow Man,
for ghosting this life:
so tired am I of never picking
the burned piece of cake
in the druid’s bannock ritual,
of missing the mistletoe,
of each night’s party ending
with “Dancing on My Own.”
CLINTING IN THE WOODS
I found a pair of velvet-covered antlers.
Three fingers reached from an open palm
still throbbing with platelet’s hot breath,
grave markings perched on snow.
I clasped the shed horns, abandoned
by some migrating buck, triple brow tine
doubtless cast from a fervent rut, and slid
the pulsing things into my rucksack,
clanging against my canteen and matches.
A slit was cut in their toes, the split-hoofed
ungulates, seams cleaving in thorny keratin
like threads sewn in wool. In my embroidered
tabi boots, I returned to my winter cabin,
sinking into the crust of my morning steps.
The antlers battered my flesh a bluish hue,
my tender skin stinging when I undressed,
bathwater steaming as my fire crackled
and spat. I sighed and relaxed, conjuring
what I’d once read of the artifact’s medicinal
qualities, and examined it under cobalt flame.
Finding the antlers adequate specimens,
I pressed my lips against one thick branch,
tongued the velvet sheathing, and chewed.
I swallowed the fibre as I entered my water,
and within moments, felt tufts of fine hair
as pedicles grew. I was fated, bone collector,
to wander under this same weird moon.
SAGA
Allow me to sing you
the song of my people,
says the common snipe
from Hallgrímskirkja’s steeple.
The arctic blue fox
has skin for days.
We removed his sleek fur
with a sharpened blade.
From crown to chandelier
the reindeer’s reign passed.
We sucked antler’s marrow
and poured a bronze cast.
So many men gathered
in the circle’s three rows.
A Britney song was on.
Farmers came to blows.
THE NECROPANTS
The pair of skin slacks was well hung,
in want of a sorcerer to wear them.
Like pantyhose of moulded silicon,
two legs stood behind glass – but
the fabric was epidermis, covered
in hosiery runs of hair that ran
their length, the skin still malleable,
loosened from the flesh and sewn.
Widely rumoured, rarely known,
we gaped before the Necropants.
Though stitching a pair is difficult
even for gifted magicians,
many cunning folk have heard
of the tool to make gold grow,
the nábrók of ancient grimoires.
We know the sorcerer who wishes
to wear this eerie disguise must first
make a pact with a living man’s lower
limbs and lap. But what depraved
mind would sanction any old wizard
to dig up his corpse? He must flay it,
careful not to make holes or scratches,
keeping trousers intact from feet
to waistband, allowing another
to prance forth wearing his legs.
What soul could rest knowing
another wore his sk
in? And worse,
the sorcerer’s work was not yet
finished. He must steal a coin
from a poor widow at Christmas,
or Easter, or Whitsun, and slip it –
dare I say – into the empty scrotum.
The magic is such that the Necropants
will draw coins from living souls,
and his crotch will never be empty
when he scratches it. One catch
lets us stomach this perversion:
if the owner fails to gift them before
his mortal passing, his skin will crawl
with lice. He must drop his trousers
before he dies. Once a willing heir
is identified, this new pervert steps
into the right leg before the wizard
exits the left. The task is finished;
his crotch will pay dividends.
FORTUNE
Previews for movies we’ve already seen comfort
like digging for a stone I know by feel,
engraved with my fortune, hand-picked.
In the night, ice cracks in the AC, waking us.
I turn the dial and hear women yelling
in the street, then a car turning into the alley.
In morning fatigue, my vision settles
on the veins of a woman bagging our groceries
at Bulk Barn. A bulging star, she brandishes
something other-worldly implanted in her.
We want to be stranger than what we are.
I pay what we owe and enter the idling car.
WITCHES’ SABBATH
In Goya’s reconstructed black room,
me and thirty kindergarteners
watch a dog drown. Call me Asmodea,
the female devil who exposes
the inside of houses like this one,
frescoes stripped from walls.
Domestic taxidermy had us
hovering as I gestured to the life
we were fabricating together,
our every hope lost to the fates,
their scissors cutting what threads of life
I had spooled around my finger.
We transformed into two figures
bludgeoning each other with clubs
in the deaf man’s house, X-rays
revealing a grassy meadow we’d lazed
in once. Now I’m a snout whispering
in your ear as you, old man, lean
on your staff. I’m the manola
who, underneath a layer of paint,
appears bare-headed. Veil shed,
I lean on a doorway I might still enter.
I am Judith beheading Holofernes,
the reticent girl transfixed in a chair,
patiently awaiting my initiation
as the cloaked goat’s lips part in song.
I’m the monster I knew I was all along.
MIND READER
Nothing was enough: spilled
salt you tossed over your shoulder,
bedstraw I threw in the air.
Spices struck bodies in the bar,
and I asked what I was to you:
two mirrors against each other
forming a chamber of reflections
that wouldn’t let you through.
DREAM INTERPRETATION
I dream we veer off a bridge,
the rivers crossed travelling
the Mississippi, the Missouri.
She can’t abort the memory
a prairie billboard reads.
Petals fall from the birthday lilies
you bought me, dragonflies
on the windshield hardened to tar.
A quiet murmuring, the woman
on the radio describes a plot
of land lush with greenery.
She took a hoe to her earth
and dug up insulation, raked carpet,
her shovel clanging against tin,
breaking sheets of cloudy glass.
Her fertile land was a dumping
ground, duped by the man
who sold it to her. I dreamed
we dreamed of starting over,
of tilling the earth, seeding it,
cultivating corrugated sheets,
automobile chassis, rebar, green
glass dump with sulphide flower.
Two gravestones fixed in earth,
missing names. They waited for us.
CARVE OUT THE EYEHOLE
I kiss that cold space on his cheek,
a corner of light. I’m on top
so it feels like I’ve got the dick.
Feels good, right?
Waves froth up and rise inside me.
I close one eye and see
the bridge of my nose,
as if looking out of a face.
Rolling hills are Stone City, Iowa,
trees an artichoke’s leaves.
Texture brings me closer to a tumble,
to absolution. A church
both rubber and angular is what paint is.
Art out of some renaissance brain
but anachronistic, rounded edges
of history and the night
made of dark pigment and light.
He grinds up on me. He smells
like coffee. What is the etymology
of Dilly Bar? We go to a DQ
with a hand-painted sign, order Dickel
Whisky for the stupid rhyme.
I walk home before the thunder
and take pictures of police cruisers,
the park’s grass raised
to invisible borders on our bodies.
I pull often to the smooth meat of my brain
grating against carpet fibres.
These twisting fabrics veer within,
silk and static I feel
in my gut, flipped. My knees double
over and fold into self. Love,
I love my body. It helps me see.
ON REMIXING VELÁZQUEZ’S LAS MENINAS
Picasso’s drawings prefigure Crumb:
prostitute’s legs perpetually spread, breasts
perfectly bulbous, a failure of anatomy
in eroticism. A tinny orgy ricochets
from plastic receivers as I approach a couple
sharing one device. Polyamory turns
unsavoury so we part at the gored horse
of Lascaux, the massacre proto-Guernican,
grotesque as the kisses of women roaming
the Ramblas with Zara bags. This is me
becoming more and more angular, viewing
Picasso’s Las Meninas remixes, a portrait
of infant Margarita, heroine of realism
here transformed into triangles, circles, lines.
Every iteration takes Velázquez further
from representation until another angle
emerges – it’s the sister who interests him,
she who presents candlestick and flame.
In this act of bestowing, the light is the focus
of each frame, its viewers captivated until
we are all monochrome. Picasso abandons
Velázquez for the dovecote on his balcony:
splayed feathers, pointed beaks, incessant
coos. The Bay of Cannes’s distant view.
REAL MADRID
The spring I was only drawing cups and pentacles,
the gold leaf wore off my laurel necklace, metal
plating underneath. Palacio Real’s upholstery
matches carpets matching curtains of Gasparini’s
room, where the king performed against blue silk walls
the ceremony of getting dressed. Rococo follows
penchant for chinoiserie: plaster foliage against wooden
frames as Atlas bears his globe of constellations,
Spain no comfort for my Taurus sun, made queasy
by swinging pendulums, Aurora gliding across the ceiling.
Posit this: if I were a guest at Maria Cristina’s wedding
to the king would I panic and leave? One place
setting out of formation, chair disturbed the slightest bit.
That’s me creaking across wooden floors to the exit.
I’m the Real Madrid: holy water resting in a conch,
no food here but for the soul, a woman’s matchstick-
patterned blouse a fire hazard to our Airbnb’s five
locked doors. In this exquisite stucco room of harpies,
pairs of winged infants bear the insignia of Maria Luisa’s
female order. They reprieve Zeus on his eagle,
the throne room’s violence, ticking of a distant clock,
Medici lions with their marble ball. Outside the palace
walls, I deal a new spread of swords and wands,
the Spanish Marseilles marking conflict and loss.
STUDY OF A TORSO
When pictures of decapitated journalists
started appearing in my Twitter feed,
their heads lolled in the dirt cartoonishly.
I’ve been reading the news
so much it’s entered me.
In the night I dream I’m raped
in my bed when my husband’s away,
the pain in my abdomen so sharp
it wakens me. In a dark room
my iPhone leads me to the law student
who didn’t know she’d been attacked
until she viewed it on screen.
She’d said anything to clear his name.
When I drive my husband to Mercy
the third time in as many weeks,
ice obscures the windshield.
I never drive and he makes me brake
so he can get out to clear the ice away,
blood streaking the glass,
globules of flesh smeared on the seat.
A bloody doorknob greets our neighbour,
circular saw still plugged in on the lawn.
I dreamed of it for weeks: his screams,
how much worse it might have been.
I’d asked if I should go back to look
for his fingers, unaware he held them
still attached in hand.
How he’d get me off without them
flashed through my mind even then.
In a room full of brains
I feel the heat of synapses.
I am a flesh marionette, off balance
waiting for the next catastrophe.
A weapon wails from the yard.
I pick my fingers off the floor,
not knowing I had it in me.
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