Pastoral with No Quarter
My vanguard is here to lose a horse called Fear
Object in the image of a meadow. There, the gold
of earth confirmed, softer than my face but faster
than a finger in suburbia licking off disaster's
Hello. My sword is honey. There, a reason to fear
it is nothing but. But for its edge go we? How
it forged a humanity in me, then made me how
he said I'd be—wherefore person, once, but faster.
There, a correct hero: bent in wind, covered skin,
depressed like a non-white button. A face his kin
food-group as coloring, muttering. Reports show
acceptance watering the meadow's sugar blades
under a watery sunset flensed by the dilute blade
of my friend. I sealed a rot of self under my skin
for sweetness' sake. My gun is honey whipped mean.
My cavalry thinks of making love but cannot mean
wild horses surviving the saddle, bit, and bald
heaven insuring a citizen's eye the mindless green
of paper honey, or a supremacist sheet of golf green
repeated. Let she who survives by her mouth mean
kickback. Let bravado's vibratto be a swollen braid
lowered into a hive of men. Be a bad, girlish blade
lopping the hype in two, a bouquet of wildish green
shrieking out in alarming arms. Let my visible skin
see you out. Let my sisters in, my magicians, kin
body-checking factories where the body turned blade
zeroed to the x of we. It's annihilation magic—how
automatic. My footnote is a compulsion to throw
down a mercy. Once upon a time, we saved the skin
refusing to say the crime while heaving to sing faster.
Our conscience was half honey, then it went faster
than golden years in which six men unmade me. How
little danger in dishabille they said I'd be. The gold
comes rising out of me, and then what kings said gold
should be—like man, but better. Or honey, but faster,
fearful. But honey you ought be. My monarch is feral.
from THE NIGHTINGALE
Said the emperor, "The whole world knows what I possess better than I do myself."
It was wrong of me to diss the stiffly evolving corn.
It longs to be mediocre, as do the years I did not live.
I have never felt so American as the time I mated
a poem I imagined would terrorize my sexualization
to a poem I tore up after the sex act of immigration
and stayed awake that you, haute poet, might see me
period. I have lived sans full-length mirror since 2009
as a call-out with a hole. Bile fills it, flapping prettily,
a feeling that flips me off—oh-ho, what a pretty bird.
It was what of me to serve up drama like a salty verb,
like haute semen, like a vigil buttressing a pantoum?
A tiny gold key is overstimulating the rented grove.
Rewind the formula—a rental god, quiche, and title
divide two girly criminals on a brilliant fabergé pyre.
"Litte maiden," said the lord-in-waiting, "I will obtain for you constant employment in the kitchen,
and you shall have permission to see the emperor dine, if you lead us to the nightingale…"
It was hawt of me to serve our trauma to a man
who cries royal, white tears into a casserole au vin.
A white woman may enter the castle via credit.
They let me in the foyer to multiply into kinks to
divvy in girls. To ombré our genius into his crime
into my anorexia showing a little national anthem.
It is so wasted of me to ask a nation for acceptance
when all I want is to eat and drink sans feeling
for bleeding, and in the armoire I am a mere chink
with some nerve. Let us dine with appropriate chill.
I made the city nervous. I was removed apropos of
universality, that pretty, hegemonic, doe-shaped doe.
Want of whiteness is wine for lunch, the pain of full
-ness such a greatness, he made my replica right away.
Beautiful flowers, round which little bells were tied, stood in the corridors…
these bells tinkled so loudly that no one could speak to be heard.
He made my other in a nest to correct my making,
my survivor's skill-set wrapped in a string of theory—
the universe is a moral condo where essentialist Joe
may pouch, soap, and rinse his genitals in systemic
privacy—as cheap coke wrings my stem out on sofas
in duplex forest units so I forget every trauma I live
my other lives too—a thread snaps in an Oriental rug
uncleanly and poof!, evidence this disease saved her
the worst of me—proof of my drinking anywhere he
fingered and spread me about like a soft manifesto
forgetting forgot in the suburb I could not say Leave,
not Take me, instead—he saw my rude lip in her face
instead—we crossed like a ruby see-saw and I sang
frankly for the body to believe it can, it won't, exist—
"Is it possible?" said the lord-in-waiting, "I never imagined it would be a little, plain, simple
thing like that. She has certainly changed color at seeing so many grand people around her."
My manifesto is soft. My finger points to my own head.
My want for a force of nature, a lovely lack of thrust
in trust. My less-and-less horror at my natural beauty
than my engineer is able to upholster my pleasure
void with. My body exists but cannot be an insurgent
hole tip, it tips. My country is a confessional narrative
-lyric debut. My nationality is an ISBN in my cunt,
my king moving in and out of a structure of no choice
not in this story. My pleasing mechanism is holstered
in white space fattened off similes in a timothy field
poems stuff like birds lovable but filthy with fable.
My allegory is anxious. Can it believe what it did to
my oh my—the timely penetration of a head in a crown
looks this good. My knees are weak. My mind is weak.
