Sexual Object Permanence
Look.
Look at it.
Look at my face.
Baby,
do you?
Do you like it?
Do you like that?
Look.
Look at it.
Look at my face.
Does it look like I care?
Does it?
Do I look soft?
What about my lips?
Do you like their shimmer?
Do they look beautiful?
Does it look like I’ve mounted
two neon slick bullets on my face?
Does it?
Do you?
Do you want to?
Do you want to pet me?
Little bunny.
Little bunny rabbit.
Little bear.
Little lamb.
Little lion breaking its incisor off into your cornea.
So cute.
So cuddly.
Don’t cry.
Does it?
Does it hurt?
Does it look like I care?
Does it look like my face is a mass of melting snakes?
Sometimes
I have feelings.
Sometimes
those feelings are that my face is a mass
of adders in various states of liquefication.
Do you like that?
Is that exciting?
Baby?
You like when I do that?
Do you?
Did I?
Did I scare you?
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry, baby.
Baby, did it?
Did it hurt?
Did it hurt when you fell?
Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?
Does that mean this is hell?
Does it?
Does it look like I care?
What do demons look like?
Are you a demon?
Am I a demon?
Baby?
Do you?
Do you think?
Do you think about me?
In what ways do you think about me?
Do you like to think about me in certain positions?
Do you like to think about me in the position
where I’m made of scorpions, bees, and wasps?
Does that turn you on?
What about when my body is wrapped around you
because I’m a water torture cell?
Do you like that?
Does that turn you on?
Are you horny, baby?
Are you hard?
Is that a flashlight in your pocket?
Are you just actually afraid of the dark?
Did you?
Did you know?
Did you know that anyone who says they’re not afraid of the dark is lying?
The insides of our bodies are always dark.
Forces beyond our knowledge are constantly at work at the missile laboratories
of our cell walls.
The insides of our bodies are constantly conspiring against us without
the surveillance or express permission of our egos.
Hold me.
Hold me baby.
My body is heavy
roped with blood.
I want it.
I want you.
I want the knowledge of the darkest parts of your body.
I want you to bury more dark things inside me.
Things that grow and function without my express permission.
Things I did not know you put there but which
burst out of my chest later
like homemade New Year’s Eve pyrotechnics.
I can’t.
I can’t help it.
I can’t help myself.
I have to.
I have to know.
I have to know how things will grow inside of me.
I have to feel the pain of their hooves
saloon dooring through the insides of my teeth.
Do you like that?
What do you like?
How do you like it?
Do you like it when I spread myself
out on your lap?
Here?
Right here?
Look.
Look at me.
Am I your landscape again?
Do you like that?
Do you like manipulating my body
into the frame of a pastoral?
For you
baby:
I’ll be a crippled strip mall off the mid-summer highway
the heat of our encounter glossing me in wet mirage.
For you
baby:
I’ll be a glistening Miami pool
full of dead peacocks.
For you
baby:
I’ll be the flattened back
of a nuclear test site.
For you
baby:
I’ll be the desert stuck in the sleep paralysis of snowtime
the hyperventilation of being trapped under glass.
For you
baby:
I’ll be the repetition of hills in the place my grandmother is buried
her bony finger pushing up blades of dead grass.
For you
baby:
I’ll be infinite acres of oil slicks
draped on white birds like dirty hospital gauze.
For you
baby:
I’ll be the leftovers
of a hyper-verdant minefield.
Do you like knowing
that you could decimate me to the bedrock of my hipbones?
I want.
I want it.
I want you to explode with me.
I barely know you.
I want to.
I want to know you.
I want to know you intimately.
Move your heaviness on top of me.
Shield the blast with your belly.
Send the spray of our bodies across the
event horizon of our microcosmic lives.
Do you?
Do you like that?
Does that feel nice?
Does it?
Does it look like I care?
Baby
tell me.
Tell me something.
Tell me something I don’t know.
Like, for instance, why do people think
I’m really fucking pretty,
when I’m actually really fucking sad?
Like, for instance, why can I
put my hands straight through myself
like my stomach is a waterfall,
and how do I make that not happen anymore?
Like, for instance, when I suck your honeycombed fingers
why do I always let your other hand encircle tight
my throat, perfect diadem?
Like for instance why I want my ear so close to your heart
that the tick of you switchblades the thin shrouds
of my eardrums?
Like for instance why I want my ear so close to your heart
that it fills my skull with your blood?
Baby, I have.
I have spent.
I have spent the last ten years
as a childless mother.
I feel.
I feel finally that something
is blooming inside of me.
Nest of snakes
Litter of famine lions
This stockpile of firepower
packed so dense no light can peek through.
This marble of my own blood
poured into my palm.
It carves a warpath down
the salt cliffs of my arms.
It uncovers the atrocities
sheathed inside my breastbone.
Does that turn you on?
Do you like that?
Babe?
Do you like the pristine condition
of my digestive tract?
Do you like that I am perfect as the airstream
cuddling a missile?
I want to hold you that way,
baby. I want to be bent acute
into our destruction.
Baby I’m sorry.
I’m sorry for saying sorry so much.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry for the things I said.
I’m sorry for the things I said when I was hungry.
How the shotgun crumbs of my words lodge under your skin.
I’m sorry for the things I said when I thought the world was on fire
or maybe the sun was rising. I didn’t have my glasses on,
it was darkly beautiful inside your bedroom, so naturally
I fell a little bit in love with the heat.
I want.
I want to.
I want to be cruel.
I want to use a knife carved of men’s femurs
to cut the kindness from my own heart.
They say.
They say that kindness keeps.
They say that kindness keeps you weak.
I wish.
I wish I didn’t.
I wish I didn’t care.
I wish I didn’t care about the way you are.
I wish I didn’t care about the way they are
with me: my kindness a gleaming red button.
Push.
Push yourself.
Push yourself into my skin.
Wear me like a blanket.
Fold me back up.
Is this what love is?
Baby?
A series of masks?
Baby.
Baby I’m broke.
Baby I’m broken
over your knee
and the hole in my stomach blooms
like a bruise on hilltops
of girlish cheekbones.
Do you?
Do you want?
Do you want me like this?
All empty-feeling and outward expression.
All papier-mache noon-sun.
All trying to put out the fires
chewing up the outskirts of my body.
Baby
Tell me.
Tell me something.
Tell me something I don’t know.
Like, for instance, when your skin is this close to mine
can you feel how numb I am?
Baby I miss you.
Baby I miss you already,
the way your fingers glut the inside
of my mouth, as you rifle through my wires.
Sometimes I like to feel disconnected,
sometimes being disconnected is better
than being hotwired.
Baby.
Baby, I get it.
I get the impression that I’m more agreeable
when I’m not flammable.
Hold me.
Hold me, baby.
Hold me as if there were parts of me
that are not malignant, malfunction.
Hold me as if there were parts of me
that are not ticking to set you ablaze.
Baby,
tell me.
Tell me baby,
why does being with you feel like the loveliest
punch in the stomach? The loveliest rose glass
shards clinging to the insides of my ribs?
Baby.
Baby tell me.
Baby tell me again.
Tell me again how I’m your warm night mistress
the empty bowels of the streetlights coating my skin.
Tell me again by the light of your dying cherry
how you want to make your grave inside me.
Do you?
Do you like it?
Do you like that baby?
Do you like that you’ll never know
my death and depth?
Look.
Look at it.
Look at my face.
Do you like it?
Do you like that baby?
Do you?
Does it look like I care?
Does it look like my skull
is palimpsesting through?
Are my eyes sunken in
or is death tiptoeing out
of the pool of my skin?
Baby in direct sunlight
I can fumble for the corner of the sheets, the mattress,
the comfort cavern you’ve dug in,
witness the place where your body is a grave
or a flowerbed.
Baby, look.
Look at me.
Please,
Look at my body.
Tell me baby,
am I a corpse or a seed?
I want to.
I want to feel.
I want to feel the perfect roundness of your words
encircling themselves around my radius and ulna.
I want to feel them sprout up through the top of my tongue.
so that you might recognize something you love in me.
Baby put.
Put your palms.
Put your palms to my back,
my lily wilt stomach
is a freshly fired gun.
I hope.
I hope that you.
I hope that you scald your perfect fingertips on me.
Baby.
Baby I want.
Baby I want an ass so perfect
that men convulse into their dinner plates
if they look at it the wrong way.
I want eyes so blue
that men crawl through me
like I’m razor wire, their stomach acid
lining the ground.
I want breasts full and white
as sister ghosts. I want to pull the light
from the room with my breathing.
I want thighs so thick
they choke my own happiness
like low-lying smoke.
I want a voice pure
as rat poison,
grenade salvo.
I want a tongue slick as a pocket knife
so my cut lip won’t hurt
‘til I’m near dead.
Tell me.
Tell me baby.
Tell me what love’s face looks like.
Is its mouth crushed in diamonds
of your dried saliva?
Tell me baby.
Tell me about what love’s face looks like.
Is it cheek sideways drowning in the sink
of your milk-filled hands?
Tell me baby.
Tell me about what love’s face looks like
Is it the burnt out warehouse of my body
I’m left with after you fuck me?
Tell me baby.
Tell me about what love’s face looks like.
Is it the intensity of your bedroom eyes
two horseflies dead in the whipping cream?
Look.
Look at me.
Does it look like I care?
Tell me.
Tell me baby.
Tell me this is some kind of love,
that I am not an empty urn taking
up dark space.
Tell me baby.
Tell me the way I love is right,
that I am not too much.
Baby,
I think.
I think my love is like how an eclipse
wholly swallows the fisheye of the sun.
I think.
I think my love is like when someone lets you shake out the light
stuck inside their skin for a little bit of happiness.
I think.
I think my love is like stepping barefoot
into blooming cacti.
I think.
I think my love is like a circle-pit
on a claustrophobic teenaged summer night.
I think.
I think my love is like a doctor
letting too much blood into the bucket.
I think.
I think my love is like being surrounded by warm creatures
in a dark forest, and the creatures are wolves,
and their paws creep closer to you in the dark,
and their growls pour into that cavern in your chest,
and they’re longing to lick your adam’s apple
and the forest is on fire
and the wolves are on fire
and you’re on fire
and I’m on fire
and I’m on fire
I’m on fire
I’m on fire
I’m on fire
Help me
How do I stop
being on fire?
Baby.
Baby let’s.
Let’s build a home together, a life,
burn it with my diesel teeth
my lit tongue.
Will you?
Will you please?
Will you please peel the flames from my body?
Baby.
Tell me.
Tell me something I don’t know.
Like, for instance, why everything you say makes sense
and it makes me hate you?
Baby
Tell me.
Tell me something I don’t know.
Like, for instance, why the snow makes me lethargic,
why I wish to god I could climb inside of your mouth
and let your words brush through my hair like moths.
Baby
Tell me.
Tell me how I taste.
Tell me how I taste when I’ve been tinctured
sunflower, scorpion tail, lion’s tooth,
the lit ethanol of my eyes.
Two drops under your tongue.
Baby
I have.
I have spent.
I have spent too long perched on my haunches.
Too long in the spring of girlhood, field of thistles,
daisy-chain rot.
Baby,
Baby I want
Baby I want to be made entirely of wildflowers.
I want to be made entirely of rusted nails.
Hold me
Hold me to your chest
Hold me to your chest and bury your face in me.
I am a bouquet
of exposed nerves.
Hold me
Hold me to your chest
Hold me to your chest in the quiet of nighttime
when the moon sheds its virus-light
on my upturned face.
Hold me
Hold me to you
like a knee to the jaw
cupid’s bow
split.
Hold me
Hold me
Hold me
I am swollen.
transmutation altar :: fall
