Kat

15

marianne: a meal in three courses
(june 2014)

course one: oysters in lemon sauce
(on oysters and women)

oysters lived in the soft of her throat like unfeeling freckles;
callous lemons tipped their velvet flesh to sunlight so
that they may flicker, shiver, eyes like candles retiring,
vacating raspberry jam-jar sockets for faraway places.

silk is hidden behind the knees; down is swathed in
scales of skin, an irregular bird, half-plucked. body,
break like water. warmth from fly-away veins will fade as
all we are left with is light and marrow, rich like white chocolate.

the cloister of cold water is steeped like tea; how much less am
i in the dark than she? a tongue in her teeth will curdle and
quiet as a woman is made a tableau by the water,
dusky and exquisite, beyond time. like syrup, blood clots.

a woman is cooked and served like oysters in sauce, a once-living thing
for us to watch. we search through the stillness of ceded oysters
and women, and we find our enlightenment missing. body, break like water.

course two: still life with meat
(on a butcher's shop)

I like where the liver lives in the body- skin, swollen like a bruise, and
adipose like apricots, a sheath for the tenderness of brown- it's where
the heart should be. an ox is strung from our ceiling, and its back
arches and the liver lays over the organs like a wafer on a tongue.

what happens to a liver when it dies? does it become a dier? if my
liver really is where my heart lives, will enough drinking break me?

"it's all just meat to me," said my father, the butcher, some time before
he died. I guess he's just meat to us to now. when they cut up a cow,

they cut off the nose first: we have a blue bucket full of the sticky
black velvet, a bucket full of soft faces. my father said he could skin
a pig in the dark. how do you write an epitaph for a man like that?

"we're all just meat," says my mother after the butcher's death.
I guess it was all just meat to him too.

she chose peonies for the funeral: their petals were like tendrils
of muscle.

course three: flesh fruits
(on barfighters and fruit)

hands in repose: skin splits and flesh glistens like the inside of a
pomegranate. knuckles, taut like plum skins, make way for the
glossy pulp beneath, and the pits rear their heads. bone breaks.
hands in repose: two flesh fruits opening, throwing skin wide

and casting seeds aside to settle in the pavement outside O'Malley's.
-maybe trees will grow from them. but the legs are still heavy with fat, tart
with unripeness, but the curb is wet and candied with juice and it's burning in
the place where the mouth becomes throat. four hands find peace as they fracture.

our bodies become metronomic with hits. how the chaos of
lunatic wind burns above us- how sorry that we're
hungry in the vat of carrion, of fruit laden and foul,
how we only find our calm in this cloying.