I come for you on the people's chariot
interpreted in nightgown,
sidelined and smoking,
breakfast huevos in hand,
for we are poorer figures with love
and poorer still, talking this city
from block into block into
that which sells
a plastic surprise
in the snake oil's morning,
a unisex of truth bearing.
She rears her head into mine
for the waking bile
onto newsprint hands
that speak into being
god's pretty linemen. They are petty,
those granite masters of needlepoint.
They serve to handle the butterflies'
scratch on dawn's aching shores,
another undone sexual. We lean
and lap the streams of coffees
and cream, milky caramels
that blow the kiss of hellos
into bombs overflowing
fast on their words, jasmine
blossom masks that make
the toxins' provinces
burn into our angular bodies.
We stand for bleached blonde smiles
of names on next summer's shores.
We play happy faces, and
though the walls remain intact,
we ignore the dress of death
when they mirage America back.
The philosopher, a pompadour,
speaks without moving his lips.
He throws
a cannonball, like caution,
about like a voluptuary,
which means there is an object
seen at great distance
wearing its garments
for slip-to-lace to shrug-it-off,
much like the love we feel
for departed cast members
who always showered
a licking smile
your way as you passed
out. Forgive me, I am the final
seminary soul to
check your shape
in the dress of that check-out line—
The fundamental issue here
doesn't seem to be about speed
but about whose process
I repeat
well enough to say average
grim reapers would sleep
and very few good ones go eager
to eat the lice from your hands,
pass the soup of stupidity
off as love's
castigations, which goes without
saying are just the feathers
in childhood's cap that float
behind his every footstep
slapping him back
through bathroom lines
until the ship sets sail,
never to be heard
from beyond the equator's
jungle-rife scenes and slaves
we earlier made but no
longer cohabit with,
or mark the imprint
of our footprints against.
It's not a complicated math.
Add the pressure of expectation
to the height of expectation.
Weigh cooperation
against the fear of an adult forever.
Where does it look like
everything comes from?
I want to meet the woman who
pulled that clock
by its gnarly roots and offered
her throttled seconds
sideways through the mouth
of a vagina, through the lips
of her species
that refuses the periphery
until every body asks why
not. I am those numbers,
that bidding, those
sevens in the armpits
and zeros dancing snake eyes.
My ones are all tied on
to the brick
of my revolving heart, presumed
whole numbers gone missing.
Shadowed by the nagging
hope is that we women
will prepare the canal
for you to slip back through & into.
Such is the plight of the dodo,
staring down the barrel,
demanding life to speak.
Until the end, the professor's sister's faith and hope
ran rough around the edges, but her story held firm.
She was the child of a café man who cleaned the floors
of cinnamon and ate the rinds of lemons nightly.
She only dines on peach skin flesh in revolt these days.
15 years of solitude have left her a bit inept
socially, even closed off with her two Mastiff hounds,
but she won't complain of disintegration or the neighbors
who howl below her floor's screened roof with moon.
Some itch of anger into the surface but nothing her
brother's photo can't seduce away. Without, she explodes
at street cars on her way home from the bank.
Even during fights, she concoct the urge to reason
away the subway malaise: she decides that many
people draw to the myth of vampires
to rid their lives of their own identities. Who do
these monsters answer to anyway? Show me your ID?
I won't affix one. I'll lift your lips and suck
the blood from your gums and leave you
with the memory. I am mirrorless. I am invited.
I answer to no cop, priest, or medicine man.
My shadow stands down wind. The strength I have
lurks in an apartment on rafters and wind.
You can't take my money because my need is none.
The woman inhales garlic on her toast at dawn
and laughs a joke she tells her insatiable friends
with their superhero songs. People remind her of tin cans.
They are labels in clothing. They want to be filled
with something warm, creeping, something sexual
that will pour from the razored slits in their skin,
make them pretty. The sister knows the bones of words
would correct the empty papers in wallets,
the flaccid muscles that shake the party hands,
and the smiles that fall when the bare-back teeth forego
the promise of love in pain, however hollow the gesture.
Until such trails become a life, she'll sweep the floor,
hand out checks, eat the fur of night,
and name the men, in preparation, rising before her.
Amy King is the author of I'm the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, both from Blazevox Books, The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press), Kiss Me With the Mouth of Your Country (Dusie Press), and forthcoming, Slaves to Do These Things and I Want to Make You Safe. She edits the Poetics List, sponsored by The Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania (BUFFPO), moderates the Women's Poetry Listserv (WOMPO) and the Goodreads Poetry! Group, and teaches English and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College. For information on the reading series Amy co-curates, visit The Stain of Poetry: A Reading Series blog or visit her at AmyKing.org.