Fairytale: How Spring Comes to the Land of Snow & Icicles /

(Dream Map)

The body burns & smells like fake,
like ammonia & blood & guts.

Barbie leg arrows,
black & white bust sizes,
swords as houses, & you swing it all.

Say, all you want to do is fuck.
Because between it &—

a place we invent to need
even as we know not this skin.

Why else this plastic design

our bodies:
jello or scar?

I say, save the grotesque & it saves you.

I say, wish us open, cupped, surgeon knots
in the form of girly stuff:

gothic lipstick,
sedimentary mascara,
arabesque eyelashes.

Yes, a circle, a light, an allow.

 

Once a week, the PEN Poetry Series publishes new work by emerging and established writers from coast to coast. Subscribe to the Poetry Series mailing list and have poems delivered to your e-mail as soon as they are published (no spam, no news, just poems). We hope you like the pieces we find as much as we do, and pass them on.