So Be Bent

*Title taken from a line in George Ripley’s royal rhyme Calcination, with a line borrowed from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace

And I, radical with a degree of right feeling,

plunge into my belly: this balisong holy watered

and muscled with thorns: once fluent in the tongue

of locusts but thirsty now for purity I duolingo

the language of firstborns: I perform the appropriate

register when I pay the fare I am trained to sing

in what passes for tenor: having been once struck by red

bolts of His rancor I realize the wound was repairable

all along: hungering for rain I shall prepare a dish

of fattened earth because: delayed gratification

all the rage these days: I rehearse the script

of my dying and cross with crimson ink battle cries

that could be better: and if I, white with the love

of doves, under an hour torrent from the internet

pdf guides to flight: and if unlike how I autodidact

this life I get D20s on the rolls of my suicides: if I

admit to living only for the feeling will his misery

cease being mine: if unsheathed from me this balisong

will the sin in me say I: if through astral projection

I find the end of this horizon, who

will be my body: my body—reddening wet

with muscle: the holy caravan of thorns.

September Fourteen Poem

Across the emerald table of our lives you sip the elixir

that parts us. I surrender mine down the drain.

It is September. Last year you watched me mask new blues

from true crime news and await which tragedy I can flawlessly

overcome. Now with no need for stealth I go out donning

my amazon’d red thongs and flash at strangers my ability

to grieve in private. When I touch myself I pebble the sheets

our secrets. How gardened now must be your name.

Isle after isle in the market to hypertrain into shape my apathy

I add to cart which brand of cola is most likely to be boycott.

Later, on the floor, speech slurred with soda, I re(read) out loud

your text and true to the lyric I experience from your view

how apostrophe’d I’ve become. You purchase new furniture.

The receipt chases me across the google map for days

and days. Hisses of your voice in the sink linger. During dinner

I bite with malice my tongue so while you rehearse with her

your understudies it is the lines of my face you remember.

I dust from the porch of my house piles of salt you throw

over your shoulder; I admit during confession: each coin

I donate is yours I scraped from the bottom

of every fountain. The priest puts on my tongue your body.

You look down my throat to fulfill its tea leaves.