Uh, Caliban
How will history remember our kitchen,
our tabernacle and brûloir?
Who will depict us
in the major movie adaptation?
Three peaches on a stone plinth,
a wood carving of a debt collector.
The art world has no name for what we are,
no terminology for beasts like us.
Some people are walking introductions –
they thrive on the power of the anecdote!
I could never be so full of pith,
it’s like they say,
our kind has no capacity
for language.
Least Concern
A television with our street on it.
Look mom, we’re really happening!
A caterpillar goes into the gas chamber
and a butterfly comes out.
Some poems have no point to them,
just empty cocoons and bodies.
Thanks for Oversharing
These wide hips are not hereditary,
not an heirloom that survives cremation.
I wield a rolling pin and chase my ghost around
Bad spirit, bad spirit!, I pronounce it
and being non-native, get the vowels all wrong.
I put the glottal stop in the incinerator.
I fuck a hyacinth and become a modernist.
I become infertile, like a child.
I’m not ashamed of it, my hips cushion it,
I discharge it, I curtail it,
I pardon it.
CLOSE DISTANCE 