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Paula Mendoza-Hanna
Under Ground Glass Looking
Corinne's nocturne ascends, being tuned to the pitch of C. Me, undressed bares the sheared plane, a fractal shot
of August, a canicule parcelled into cuniculus: cubist pussy. Mosaic my nude. Nipple shard. Garmament holstered, blue-stocking gyved, giving
in--straining the go-to at every plucking rivet. Born to boon, our silver-lipped, wetting a smile with her forked velvet. She sips cream, and quaint.
Flailed a notched ferula, mouthing lambda, lambasting. She was humored and fed. Her many jaunts are vexed, are conned pupils, rough sailors--all--hooer and jib
soon broken, dismasted in tsunami, in her wet black eye. O body sold to, trafficked in glyph and rue. La langue, languor, languishing a slow, luxurious rot.
Her garden swelters tanglevine. She climbs a shivery tree crowded violet in plums, swollen with luck. Smelling sticky, plumly she looks--ripe--enough, to--
fall, drop down in immaculate swoon, heavy lidded Liddell fluttering petticoats in a maze, meant for amaranth. A woman spoils in the jar. She does blacken, fuzz and glower
the whitemeal of maggots. Her ladies in satiating, trammel and drub. We mother a widowship. Or so they sing.
A body rots A body rots
to daub, to nurse a sullen earth
A body rots A body rots
to tell a lovely story.
Leak
Warm viscous rum and honey drone
smooth pink
pebble
polished chrome's aureole, a- glow
he—is—slowly corroded, she— abrades
the rough bolt, lacking patience for
dams! for the breath
walled in a flustered apology crossed legs telegrams —or something—
Marconi forgot: the tap tap
then—slower— rove—through a hole
a drip, a hot or quick cold dive in the pool.
Tighten your fist around this.
(stop) (stop)
(stop)
Tenths
The gravel told he's home and I grew slack undid the shiver, quickly set a match to what he wrote, and scrubbed my skin hard, clean. Wiped all evidence. Smoothed the sheets. Blank page.
I left a note in his pocket. He has not seen it yet. Else he would have called me upset. It said: Sorry I knifed the frets on its neck, and cut your song to splinters. But baby, it just wasn't any good. No matter. String along another tune. She'll likely listen better than I do.
The one who couldn't play dealt it better. Text up close, or closed text, he read me good. I took it like the sweetest narcissist all pale sinew, doll pout and performance. His favorite flavor, red. He knew best to trick symmetry from a crooked moan. He enjambed my soft slants. Yes, we rhymed well. But every level stanza pants its last. We knew the natural breath stop. And stopped.
One I dreamt, in the incomplete eclipse. Unmet, only near sleep—this figment came. An apparition, in a wife-beater and Stetson, pounding Jack's old typewriter. I leaned over his page. Read him out loud.
You are the loose tooth I cannot pull out. And I like this fever better than most. If we should happen, let us be beneath dripping peaches, and a violet sky.
(what it all boils down to)
No matter your drift of flint, the fire persists. However you spoke, or wrote--the only gesture
is the word; or, not the stroke but the hue. And not the hack, or even the slaughter
and only ever, and only after: the wound. Even if every image betrays its painter
to slough the illusion, preening a new body into forgery on mortar walls or ads back-lit
fluorescent. Even if in your asking, profusely, refused provocation, or the murder boasts
the blade and not the body, for lack of one good hand —in —we imagine many
gods, like many sounds. A scream spanning every shade a vowel can blush. If I was word
enough, and you, being words enough, if this were to sustain.
I divulged—her, taroc, and him in the peach pit— a bit of news. The telling. An ancient
unshrouded, yet cannot divine this worship true. So the owl, to tree, must concede:
Yes, sound is only to fill, as blood to vein or water in glass. As light unhinges an eye, or air
to a lung. As teeth are to hiss, to these kisses a tongue. Yes, sound is nothing but a thought let go:
Ah, essence eked or--O, brutally wrecked. Here, in her cry, births the first distortion.
In the Beginning
How did She?
Once. Only dull, only puckered like the cloven hull of the grove's first seed, until: Dehisced. Un-sepaled. Peeled to the pink, Althea—only then?—perhaps.
Or, to wet and soften dirt for a shoot. The hard beam burst from larkspur's eye when you spread a mist, when yours open wide to let out and in, then Ah! This is when? I cannot say.
Then I was told to be her is his chalice, filling with wine, and when it spilleth over, thick and red, I will know. And he will know. And this is when.
Another tells I become chamber, or home. When I twin my heart, a split bough. Her song, an echo that is the song in chorus. Double metronome, though I can not understand a note.
O aria, then she is when the reed trills a breath in threnody O blood blotting her name when cane and bone slip out of frame and pierce. O mandala, it is the cord and the snake choking on its rattle O culpa, she is the deal, done.
And then? She answers, Then.
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