Love Poem: Bitch

David Ahlman​

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.

​