Three Poems |
by Ellen Elder |
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Lipstick Cranberry Frost Velvet Crush Rum Raisin. Pretty in Pink Wine on Ice Del Rio Satin. Copperglaze Brown Amber Glass Mahogany. Sweet Nothings Cherry Brown Wine with Everything. Partial Nude Hint of Red Peony. Sweet Nutmeg Burnished Crystal Cheap Thrill. Spicy Nut Peachy Blossom Apple Cordial. Chocolate Rouge Pink Blush Violent Chill. Big dick Fuck dick Suck dick. Sell dick Smear dick Sure dick. Lick dick Get dick See dick. Run Dick Plum dick Dicksickle. Hand dick Hold dick Write dick. Stick dick Up dick Humdicker. Dick comes with or without lipstick. Last Gourmet Only you you graduate fool invade my private teeth-starved façade with punctilious un-engagement. Romance a Marxist parade. We scatter along (dropping seeds, crumbs) life a temporary siege of picnic decorum. Stories, pets, rejects (your heart dialects) butter me pleasant. Your moods a menu of mistaken childhood. For you, Kamau Brathwaite on a bed of Belgian greens. For me, fine salmon tart with lemon. It’s gorgeous, mind you. We’re finished, thank you. (like growling hunger for corn bread, skillet-pampered scallops and dallops. Fed like a mistress I am. It was a ripe time, a slice-of mango-on-a-knife time). A note curls on my dresser keen of its own minute tendency toward nothing but being. It says: “Buy Joni Mitchell’s Blue.” The hotness of curry. The delirious reign of a snoring chest, lilliputian to its “nombril du monde” yanked from its mother (its cavernous deep) drum to the trumpet underneath, its performative speech crude, sloppily lewd. But I ate it all, my fuel (how oral of you to muse me) the jack of all codes who taught me nothing except to walk down my body and run with it. Trousseau The summer of ‘93 mom and I drove no further than Ocean City. Chemo was her ballast. I napped and read, poked about the pool spying old dreams like a one-track navigator. She’d jerk awake on the king-sized bed, drugged to her eyeballs from bite-sized meds— struggle to stammer: I think I’m hallucinating. I'd heave to, mark my place in Peyton Place, uncinch the scarf clutched like a caterpillar about her neck. Sometimes, I’d read aloud to her. Plunging sentence after sentence for fear if I stopped I’d end her life. Dreams jury-rigged us to consciousness: We were a lonesome crew between sinkers of meds and waves of unwavering gelatin, snorkeling off a ghost yacht named “Trousseau.” Mom got swamp-nosed and honked like a swan. A police boat from Guadeloupe passed starboard. Slick cops in ready-to-fuck wear coughed up bits of dope that rose in their wake like blow-jobs. Eyeball fish swam agape flirting between our legs. Mom peered through school windows to capture me. We were in deep water, she, still a catch even with one breast, furious to win our conch— whose slippery meat Felipe roasted in island spices. Mom wielded her bridal knives and threatened to serve me up like Boston Cream Pie. Sex on deck was prohibited but she unfurled her blue bikini— raised it in offering like the host— before flinging it at me saying she'd lost one breast, why pretend to have two?— saying it would unzip nicely in the back of a Mercedes. |
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