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June 20, 2013 Poetry

Two Poems

JSA Lowe

Two Poems photo

 

Dear analogous beloved, or poem,

You are still not listening. I said, contradict my syntax! Come on don’t be that way, come on now. 

I said I want you to bend over and pick up the spilled matches; you look at me with your eyes full of thumbtacks.

I want you to bristle with diction and your fur is like milk.

When I push your head down, your body convulses in a sight gag—hack, yak.

You are such a doll, I moan, seconds before I accidentally knock you in the jaw with my elbow and your nose starts to bleed. This is our gory sitch.

You use that meek okay of yours like a church key, it could open things. Why don’t you.

There's not much time, I've been pleading to your rosebud mouth—say Chicxulub crater, say impact extinction event or K-T boundary

You sneak around the house, I am causelessly angry. I always, you never. You always never.

Don't be so pretty. More protean. Don’t be—

In your dream I tried to saw at your throat with an electric carving knife. I don't know why you would dream that.

In my dream my mother bought you a set of Revere Ware and you moved out anyway.

You pocketed my shocked quartz. I had to play online poker for hours. Of course there were others. Say thermodynamic equilibrium, say heat death.

I lied to spare your feelings. I didn't throw you into the cenote. When you were sick I gave you ginger ale, I gave you credence.

What did you want from me, that I didn't eventually serve. I mean, give. I mean, take.

 

Diegetic

To brood in a cool bath,
imagined all virginal as when a child,

tangle of one single hair calligraphic against hip,
pubic thatch grown
thicket, bracken, no access to that
because I think we broke it, compromised inside as I have never
been, rearranged in some
intractable way like cracked-open ribs or –ectomy,
an unbridled Bardot part hacked off
not coming back. For this you have not

borne the mend, or how could you, sloppy auteur sloughing off
amid a welter of half-truth and shabby excuse,
arguments that made no
sense or how could they—No
is not an incomplete sentence; plain guilt compelled
those garbled explanations, managing
another damage, what you mangled where it could

have been a cut cut. And all I have to say about
that (drying off bubble-soaped thighs) is look, every
night the cat stretches up toward the bathtub’s
skylight, her thoughts so single you can
read them, eyes blown
all pupil: sky window!
sky window I will climb, I will climb up
to it
—she looks around for purchase

and finding none, plaints monotonously, angled by desire.

 

 

 

 

image: Caleb Curtiss


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