Two Poems

Slow to Marvel

 

You are always the finger, the line of milk

down my back. Now you've seen a man

die but it doesn't change how we fuck.

I've tried to stop speaking

in birds, liver, spine. Nothing

else works for certain sorrows,

the way they drag across a page

leaving a pus of words.

It's hard to impress a ghost

unless you beat him with a barstool

or dazzle him with the blue

bruise on your best rib.

The way bodies bend toward or away

from each other like warped mirrors.

Naked on a chair. Tracks in the snow

of our backyard. I only imagine an enormous

creature sick with streetlamp light.

I want to be a face of smeared oil only.

I want to be done with shame.

Do you remember when we went

to that room of miniature rooms

in the museum? You kept looking

for kitchens with open windows,

the smell of grass, an escape

on the back of your swollen

tongue. I just wanted curving

stairs that didn't lead to nowhere.

 

Why the Girls in My Poetry Workshop Keep Writing about Antlers

 

He starts the morning digging his fingers

into the muscle of my left hip. We are always trying

to find the right threshold between pain

and pleasure. Moose shed & regrow their antlers

each year after mating season. In my dream,

it was a different boy who kissed each

of my ribs (your counting does not make

me made from). That the growth correlates

to the amount of daylight that soaks through

an arctic winter. Used

to both attack and attract. He said

he wouldn't trace any other part of my body

for fear of reprimand. Don't you want

to be scolded? Covered in velvet, a layer of live

skin, a circulatory system. The selective

moment is sexual. Pumping to his competing

organs. The soft tissue of a stranger. The velvet dries

& peels off in strips like bleeding wallpaper. Does it hurt?

He asks, but he won't stop either way. You see,

antlers, unlike horns, are not affixed

to the skull.