~*~
HYENA QUEEN
--for Julie Speed, after Vito & the Hyena Queen
I’m sick of chucking sticks for this pack
of lip-lickers.
I’ve thrown
my last bone, yet still they skulk
at the hem of my skirt, lurking
in the twilight of my noon-lit shadow.
Lovers, of course, are deterred
by all this blood. Except by muzzles,
my underbelly goes
unnuzzled. All my shoes are ruined.
Was it just last March I decided
I looked sharp in bite marks, teeth
wringing my wrists of their virgin
skin? Now I long for a single nipless
kiss. To spoon without scruff
up my nose. A bed cleaned of leaves
and leftovers. Lettuce.In the beginning I couldn’t resist
all the bowing and crouching, sucked
in by this smirking congregation swift
with hot gifts and songs like clock-
work. Never lacking for lunch
or lullabies, a girl could grow
attached to this lathe of cave,
loll stinking in its grip for days,
dosed on liver.
My mother’s
mother had a taste
for sweetbreads – yes, I know
to be thrilled by gizzards piled
fresh at my feet. More than enough
is finally too much:Have I forgotten the sun,
laundered scent of sky,
that crisp silence behind
the buzz of flies? Time to stand up.
Shake them off. Make a break
for the trees.
~*~
HIVE
Suppose she’s up to her hips
in the creek. It’s late. Pines along
the bank shiver needles into the dark.
Into her hair. Her skin, gibbous, sloughs
off light. Sheds it like leaves into the water.
The water, slurring out of the dark down
little falls of rock, across roots and logs,
ringing her belly and lower back, is not water.
She’s wading in a floe of bees. They loll, as if
smoked. And she is not surprised at the lurid
pulse of tufted abdomens. Thousands
of wings, black marble eyes, miniscule feet
threading between her legs. Furred pearls
murmuring between her fingers. Cuffing
her wrists trailing in the stream of them.
How many does it take to fill this bed? Creek
of bees. Cupping a handful she stuffs her mouth.
Tongues succulent buzz and nettle. A cloud
of sting. She opens and they come and go.
Butter her lips with pollen. Honeycomb
her throat. Each night this goes on. Until
she has no need for cups or plates. Meat or
love or television. Until her breath is thistle
at the end of summer. Her voice nothing but hum.
~*~
STILL LIFE WITH SAFETY SCISSORS
The woman with the scissors within me is waiting for the man to teeter from his cocktail hour toward his car in the alley. When he steps off the curb she’s on him. Like a hummingbird on a honey-suckle hedge, like Audubon on the only living archaeopteryx, like a girl on a new pink bike. She snips the threads of his pearlized buttons, watches them clatter to the asphalt, scatter in the gutter. She rips the seams of his cambric sleeves so his pretty arms pour out of the holes. She says, c’mere, big boy, give me an ear. She un-manicures his impeccable hair, saws through his genuine crocodile belt, clips along his zipper, whisks away his pants like a magic trick. She paper-dolls his boxers into a jolly roger. Pinning him in the dark to the bar’s brick wall like a wiggling entomological specimen, her knee in his gut to hold him up, and she shears off his fingers... one by one… ticks them off as they drop to the pavement: he loves me, he loves me not.
~*~
Reel to Real
~*~
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