2 Poems
A Consequence of Meeting Hades Every Night
After Natalie Diaz
—My mother says, where are you going every night?
Someone is going to kill you one of these days.
—I lose my voice in his apartment: it is a tiny basement I find myself coughing in,
cramped with potatoes and space heaters, suffocated by a bonfire of smoky butterflies.
—My mother wonders why my phone keeps blowing up
with voicemail from centaurs and scream queens, and I have no explanation
for why the roaches keep snowing out of my backpack.
I thought you were classier than that. Isn’t he making you breakfast?
—I keep dancing around her questions about test results and SSRI prescriptions,
why all the batteries in the house stop working, why I keep rationing so much light,
and why bags black as hawthorn berries bloom under my eyes
when I squirt obsidian ketchup onto a plate.
Dear Mom, you’re making me miserable…
—Like my sister, she keeps brushing my scalp with its hair of dead sparrows
and sucks on my cuticles full of dirt. I never tell her I’ve been spending time
in graveyards looking for the single pomme seed, the small red clue.
In my room she finds nothing but penis candles, unused condoms, and benzene.
—I retain a sensitivity to fridge lights, to needles, to pinpricks,
to all her jokes when she cracks her head back to laugh, a grackle in graying weather.
—She picks through my love notes; I never know how to hide them.
Then lines my room with extinguishers in case I arrive every night with nipples
wreathed in flames and she has to douse them.
—There is no room for all the DVDs she keeps slipping into my braincase.
Freddy Krueger nightmares, or how he might have HIV. Infomercials target me
about new prescriptions and condom ads at 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 12 o’clock.
He never texts back when I ask if he’s carrying seeds that can kill me.
—I wonder which of the bat-winged creatures is telling him to clasp my wrists to the bed.
Why his room has so many bug-filled curtains in it. Why the leaves keep floating
like eyelids owed to the sky. He admits, finally, to being a lake-sized cummer,
a witch of dead mangroves, and of spike proteins.
— I know I’m in trouble when he collects luxurious tears on a plate made of cyanide.
His breath plumps my lips like maraschino cherries, with Hiroshima ash,
until he calls me one day, tells me the mouth of hell isn’t as hot as the one he’s about to enter.
—In dreams he’s still fucking me with fire-sweat, palms clamped to my waist.
I still wear his necklace of handprints, which worries my mother, makes her furious.
In the world above she’s stomping trees into bloom.
I become as dark as him so she won’t find me. long breaks
GHOSTALAMION
I take you now to be my lawful LOVER, because I want to sweep the dust out of your dreams, and
drink golden bottles of whisky with you, and eat toast in bed for 100 virile years, so I solemnly swear to
kneel as a man who will not play tricks, who has promised to kiss the inNARDS of your wrists, and
will, always, keep you safe and meticulously clean, and will be there even if you reFUSE to pelt the
trash strewing your life with cleansing rains, and will never allow the sNOW of your pupils to melt; I’ll
be there to put the ice in your drinks, to save you from a good cry, to keep you from the owl of ONE
night stands and men in motels, through sickness and in health, because I know you’re the one for me,
like a bowl of great skin cream, I’ll put the magICK in your wrists to always fight those DICK heads, I
promise to loveoathe your twelve chest hairs, to never be annoyed with how fast(en) your pubes grow,
to kiss the weeping spillage from your ingrown nails, they are sacred rivers, even when we’re listening to
the freight trains of GRIEF, even when we’re paying for shit we don’t want to, even when we’re getting
stuck like WET napkins in the endLESS recursions of boredom, and you’re screeching at a job that you
hate, breaking plates, I’ll be there to enjoy your pretty lonesome self, to walk you away from bisexuals
who haven’t done their spirit work, to unburden your body, to touch myself with the wing tips of your
intellect, to drive faster and fearlessly, to hold the cell phone up to your face until you finally sleep, oh,
remember, how we have finally met, and how much we’ve had to endure, and I can’t believe you just
wanted to be somebody else, I can’t imagine it, only a LIFE with you, with my hand in your hand, with
nobody, nobody but you (MY HAND)! I want it all — you — MY HAND – this (no)body — your
minutes —like losing a tire in your chest, I know you feel alone OUT THERE but I’m here, I’m here,
I’ve always been here, so will YOU TAKE ME as your lawfully wedded husband, dear?