Love Poem: Bitch
1.
She holds the razor like a dew
claw and cuts at
the small, dark strands peeking
from her pink flesh
like stars.
She rinses away
their sudsy remains
in the acrid rain
and watches them passively
gather in the drain
before continuing
recursively over every
soft inch of her body.
She waxes herself clean
from pits to legs
the man-made metaphors
dogging her sex, all while
waters of suggestion
and reference ripple down
the shapeliness of her cleaved
breasts to her hourglass hips.
How I wish I could eat
my own tail
knowing she washes
and shaves
to remove my name.
2.
The Word
like the body of a snake,
like a series of sown necks
—mine to my father’s,
my father’s to his father’s,
my father’s father’s
to his father’s father’s
all the way back to Adam,
all the way back to the rattle
—slithers out
the back of my throat
into being.
It’s a genealogy of myths
and fictions.
A titanic monolith;
a god most venomous;
a viper in desperate need
of new skin, a circumcision.
It reproduces in the grasses
of the mind
and shifts subtle as a tiger
with eyes
envious as emerald
and scales
red-on-black.
Always ready to lunge
with surprise;
to strike with a million fangs,
a million lies.
Apology is the only antivenin,
yet my forked tongue
ties itself in knots
trying to say sorry
through stutters.
I am what I name.
3.
It’s a necrophilic relationship.
One I keep coming back to
like a decayed corpse.
I dress it to the nines
in red lipstick and rouge;
I mask it in myrrh
to subdue its stench.
But nothing can hide
its fuming reek.
Not even context.
Though I desperately wish
I could pick the spikes
from its wrists,
though I wish these caves
weren’t lit so darkly
by shady speech,
I know their misshapes
on the inner walls of me
scream.
They speak a name
I’m not hearing.
4.
My father’s voice echoes
in the caverns of my slender belly
with such blunt force
and diamond sharpness
that it makes drywall bruise
and flower wallpaper bleed.
I hear my mother’s esteem
being beaten to death
with a flat-nose of bleeps.
My inner child won’t move,
can't move.
The food, cold as the white
speckled paint
on this navy-blue metal plate,
shivers with the tremors
of his rage, her pain.
Hate is learned.
It has a one syllable name.
5.
Pinned to a sex by a sex,
by a sex against a sex,
The Word ceases
to take on new names,
new meaning,
and still
I can’t help appreciating
it’s deadness
the way I appreciate
the story of Moses
where his people
set a serpent on a pole,
and to save themselves,
looked upon it
and were healed.