Amy King

All Moons Are a Scrumptious White Silver

 

She was raised by a waitress, who entertained visitors. 

She liked fried shrimp and peppermint pie.  Was

the kind of woman who wore chiffon knickers, even as thongs

found their way gone.  She used to dive the veins

for other steeds closer to the bone.

 

Sucked it all down, hurricane whole,

I can eat without the pain now

My sputum knows the throats of all who crossed me out.

The bourgeoisie have their exploitations too, given

a cosmopolitan drive to produce consumption in any country.

 

To the great chagrin of the poor who long withstood,

we are each dislodged by every new industry

—a mother’s milk, if you will—

that no longer holds the indigenous raw,

the remotest zones, the last unswept corners of this new globe.

 

Rarely have the nude and the cooked been so neatly joined,

apron-tied string at the bend in her throat,

where she spends the lost part of night

killing baby piglets in hickory-smoked fashion-ate cycles. 

 

But it was a gentle take-over, a feel-good merger,

a kindly razor that swept the crumbs apart.

We studied how to fill the days up when the walk-down

was over.  The manufacture of foreign cars on American soil,

the phones that disconnect us in the sacro-sanctity of public

spaces, and the dirt-road ecstasy of political fervor. 

 

That took her voice in half.  She dipped it in a pan

of dead lilacs and licked the inner thigh seams. 

I turned around on rotary machines. 

The best of us plunge cultural defectors that crow

a weaker side for the salt of tides ripping our childhoods out.

 

Such went the days of whiz-bang mass surprize,

the lusty ladies of dreamy TVs for dishwasher safe

plastic martinis.  The lives of those we lost and loved

and gave away to lottos, their mothers spoke only

of a bump in the night where sex is the future disguise

of living, and the results, past bedtime, echo our own dry humping. 

 

 

 

 

Be Good and Be Country

 

When the grapes are in their wrath, I lie

low in my headless socket to see your faces

through time’s spent reading glasses.

From that death, I open the cast that restrains

your paralysis breath.  

I want to rescue you from this toy chest,

but I don’t want to use my only gusto,

so here I stand, cocker spaniel vacuum packed,

crooked brain, crustacean waves of danger.  

Look backwards.  You’ve got your circular jaw,

you’ve got a circular youth with suicides,

even past the age of honey on corpses;

people love to bet your next axe

makes more welts designed to replicate

tattoos of other countries on our backsides.

In fact, you don’t hurt grass or beetles

when you stand in vitro; you’d probably even

win the hormone race if I pushed you back

in bed, then down the stairs of copulation.

But I’d rather wrestle your entire corpus

than fuck someone for the sake of holes

that empty after me and footnotes

that fuel the rolling whites of your ripe-

eyed positions applauding their limbo.

 

 

 

 

Doctor Starch

 

He didn’t attempt the back door

when I put on my pill box hat,

cautious ingrate.

Sap for what the disease remaindered –

every day left over, I’m gaining

a weight that stands shadow-punched:

you should, pounds told, eat more,

kill pill, stretch on, walk dogs,

little tongue, stone’s throw, vomit up,

grow heart, ask legs, quiver gut,

shake down, no meat, sex less,

prove life, launch death, sell self,

machine me, x ray, honey mound,

pubic eyes, smoke pipe, victim beef,

stare lips, blanket eye, apple chunk,

tea bag, growl pouch, pound down,

sea sick, salt off, flesh sag,

liver dip, bile wish, throw soap,

row out, hope vest, that’s all

I know, dyed berry, spoon light.

 

 

 

 

Amy King is the author of I’m the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, and forthcoming, Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox Books).  For information on the reading series Amy co-curates, please visit The Stain of Poetry: A Reading Series (http://stainofpoetry.wordpress.com/) or visit her at www.amyking.org.