Dog Days
Your lips make a clicking sound
as you pull them across your teeth.
You tune your flesh towards visitation:
your joints labour over their arrangement;
a plane of light swells shoulders,
surface for eating. Strung out
across several summers, we suffer
for our conversions, each shift of subject.
You hold ice to your ankle. I miss
my hands, busy in Greece, clutching
someone’s collar. Arrogant in strange sinew,
one version of you sits in a plastic chair,
king of all the land. Double doors open
like lips, everything like lips. In July
the temperature rises 13 degrees
and you lie sweating, all Greco-Roman.
An arrowhead’s tongue nuzzles
the vulnerability under your ribs. I eat
your leftover steak; think of the soft bones
in your ear; visit the piece of you buried
by the river, your chin a bulb of heat. I go
to bed early, wake to find three of my ribs
kicking at your door. My mildewed Eden,
all the hinges scabbed with rust. I will make you:
again, and again, and again.
x
Rat Dissection Love Poem
Its fur chemically silked, a brown like
creationism: God grinding pigment in a pestle.
A fable’s hard edge in its bone-propped
skin. I think of Victorian scientists,
callous in white coats, twitching
frogs into neon life. A prey animal’s pulse
gnaws my neck, something of a blood sport.
You turn me brutalist – a bubble of blood
at my knuckles, a weight to my hands.
Last Sunday I knelt on Victorian silk
and wished for us together like vein clutches
tendon. In chapel, you stumbled
over description of Jacob’s ladder’s
sinew-pink rungs, and blushed. I am afraid
of my ulterior motives, of the kind
right hand of God. I urge my crisis of faith
to form a ragged silhouette and billow
down the wall. I want a haunting,
the way poltergeist loves the broken
glass, for its honesty and for the sound
of light passing through it. I am good
at making martyrs. A splinter
of sun, skinned through stained glass,
congeals a hamartia at your collar.
The scalpel baptised in pink Virkon.
The head of John the Baptist on a silver platter.
The unfolding of organs. The kindness
of a sharp knife in a familiar hand.