Stalking trash trucks on weekends, she
waits by signals. Men reading their
morning paper or men midstride their morning
jog or men trailing a corpse in their mourning white
lift her skirt, slide a pointed finger in
between her cheeks, then out, then kiss it
reverently. In bars and coffee shops, she has heard:
This is no age for holiness. Do these men know this,
she wonders. She ambles away from them. They
thrust plantains into her protesting mouth.
They watch her swallow.

There are nights
of all nights
when the sky turns crimson red
and the wind hollow. And on moon like this
Chiyuki’s Hiroshi wails for her sea-sucked breasts.
Hunger mounts and the neighbours’ laughter
mounts higher still. Steady as a bat
with her drum like fingers. She plays.
The soft- mint like smile
cripples his hunger and he chews
his thumb to pieces. [Read More]

How to escape a Skinner box

Electronic relationships are the easiest to erase
Reject all phone calls, Blacklist the number, Block him everywhere
Just hit the ‘delete’ button and it’s all over
Go without talking to him this minute and you can
Go the next and the next and for every minute after that
As if nothing had ever happened.
If one plus one is no longer infinity
Cut him off;
Erase all memories as though you had never met or known or understood or loved
This man; Like no one had ever known or loved or understood you.
Remember how big the world is and how little you are in it,
How ephemeral your feelings and fallacious your knowledge
Remind yourself: you are just five senses and
He, seventy-two-point-six percent water;
If this river runs its course
Let it
What would remain of you but
A few photographs (delete them)
A song (change the soundtrack)
And the feelings after rosé-induced baby talk?
Ignore, ignore all stimuli and chant this like a mantra:
In a twenty-six letter world, eight are negligible
Only one is holy
‘I’

Escape.

***

Wendy Kroy

Your attempts to win her over are
The tale of Sisyphus’ life-
Her wounded eyes, the spider’s snare
When you lose yourself between her thighs, prepare
To have her endless legs crush your neck-
She’ll trap you in her web of lies
Smile when you meet her
Kiss her even; But be aware-
Of that pistol in your pocket
Never forget this: If you hesitate to kill her
She will kill you; Beware-
This is a woman to be worshipped, not loved;
Aspire to no more than being her designated fuck,
Whatever you do keep your opinions to yourself
If she wanted the truth, she’d torture it out of you;
Remember she likes her men like her drinks
Stiff, blue
Don’t try to run or hide
You may be damned if you do but
You’re dead if you don’t
For the moment, prepare

To be snuffed out like her hourly cigarettes.

***

There’s been a mistake.
You didn’t expect this glitch.
This vanishing point
of a private murmuring city.
This fumbling
in a void of spreading
formlessness
(they told you it would
be a flower, not a slit).
Greedy mouth,
how many fingers
can you swallow?

In the movies, you would
unzip her out of her dress
and she is sexy alabaster,
leaning against the stairs,
a sell-out pimping her nipples,
readying them for your touch.
In real life, she is tired
of the metaphors – earth
and mother and whatnot.
In real life, ecstasy is far
from pretty, a groaning sickness
spasming on the carpet.

You are quickly learning
about the revolution that
brews beneath her flesh -
a whispered language of
rite and ferocity and the
invisible mountain she carries.
That to sleep,
you must lock away
your inheritance.
To emerge,
a world must unlearn itself,
then flood, then burn.

When the twitching stops,
you uncork her
(of course, she is
a bottle of wine to you)
and pour out the paraffin
from her mangled bones.
Flickering tongues
from hell lick the salt
off her thighs.
No pain felt she.
Burn’d like one burning
flame together.

You went looking for strawberries,
instead you found the manic whore,
the universe’s relentless core.

And all I see now
is my face through a curtain:
a pebbled pock-marked past,
its burning by-lanes,

and drop by drop,
like a leaking sewer,
his love, pungent,
corrosive, windblown.

And all I’ll see now
is my unborn child
learning the alphabet
and its vitriolic histories:

H for He, H for Hate,
H for Hijab, H for HCl,
and then the silent H –
H for Honour.

And if I could see now,
I’d tell you a love story –
of a genie in a bottle
of aqua regia, and

a kingdom where men
love with acid blisters
and write love’s
sour hagiography.

***

She’s a study.
A truncated,
Curving,
Elusive
Prometheus
With the moment,
this very one,
As her rock.
She’s a tangent, if you will.

She
extends
Over the planes;
A circle within a circle,
Submerging
The curling,
straining ends
Of the magnetized tracks.
She’s a limit, if you will.

She
Pulls a weight,
one with a shape,
Down
With a symmetrical force
On an uncoordinated world.
A flat, common prison.
Such silence,
Such nothing as we can only approximate
Is whole.
She’s an angle, if you will.

She
Tends
Towards infinity.
Shuttling,
Tantalizing,
Terrorizing
Effervescence.
She’s nearly there.
A tangent
Come
Almost full circle.
She’s similar, if you will.

She’s
out of view.
A silhouette
Out of the corner of one’s eye
A earring,
Shadows make startling distortions.
She will not correspond.
She’s adjacent, if you will.

***