I, Being Born a Woman, and Distressed

[slackerlindog.livejournal.com]

I, being born a woman, and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast
So subtly is the fume of life designed
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind
And leave me once again undone, possessed


Think not for this, however, this poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity - let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

Edna St. Millay

(no subject)

[demon151.livejournal.com]

One Week

For one desperate week she wanted you,
To gnaw your cracked cuticles until they bled,
Then drain them dry, your bloods commingling. In bed
She conjured up your eyes as green, not blue,
And pleased, instead of pleading to undo
The spell she'd cast. Desire gave her head-
Aches, stirred her ovaries, made her hipbones spread,
Her spine stack, her toes curl inside each shoe.

You never knew. But I did. So I pissed
A ring around you to keep her out, disinterred
The local vampire, asked when she'd been bitten,
Wore the peacock pumps you couldn't resist,
Crossed off each day, not worried or deterred,
Reading her like a book that I had written.

Traci Elder O'Dea

(no subject)

[demon151.livejournal.com]

The Perceptible World


All the dishes are blue, and lovely as eyes,

Eggs shiny and orange in a dish.
Your hands could be wood and are lovelier for this.
Tonight, fill the spaces with anything at all,
Dark strips of seaweed, rice

White as air in the story

Where everything separates in pairs, narrow as twigs.
Decorations dusted with flour or salt:
This distance pulls at the breath.

Without touching, how can I know the guests exist?
My own body solemn in its chair,

Straight as that candle, its own guttered sun.
No flowers on the table,
The center empty as the curve of an arm.

Fish opened to ribs, petaled gray flesh.
The question has vanished, but I remember your eyes,
All pupil at a distance, walnut up close.

I forget all spelling in the roundness of bowls
And how to pry such memories apart.

Malinda Markham

(no subject)

[mizraim.livejournal.com]

The City
By Charles Simic

At least one crucified at every corner.
The eyes of a mystic, madman, murderer.
They know it's truly for nothing.
The eyes do. All the martyr's sufferings
On parade. Exalted mother of us all
Tending her bundles on the sidewalk,
Speaking to each as if it were a holy child.
There were many who saw none of this.
A couple lingered on kissing lustily
Right where someone lay under a newspaper.
His bloody feet, swollen twice their size,
Jutted out into the cold of the day,
Grim proofs of a new doctrine.

I tell you, I was afraid. A man screamed
And continued walking as if nothing had happened.
Everyone whose eyes I sought avoided mine.
Was I beginning to resemble him a little?
I had no answer to any of these questions.
Neither did the crucified on the next corner.