when they came and I like Ophelia dying by white gown should have swam better but all in all my father ends with me the trauma isn’t transportable and having crossed when Cheyenne a color like infection-red lips on a white face terror from the inside a wide room my whole mouth side hooked having broken the skin just above the eye as if they didn’t have to pay for it
I meant to say that I can hold the dead in my mouth those soldiers fucked five deep but compared to what they did this thigh ties together too tight do you blame me I could shit the bones of every body they ever maimed and still keep a flower wedged against the roof of my mouth clematis are edible when pressed I wore the gown but then could not cut loose the horse
rode on having defunded a color but nobody was counting on beauty so call me by my name rose petal or anyway the cavity is something the soldier wants command of the plot holds it down rib by power-full jaw like wings imposed some beautiful brown feather spread clavicle capable of defenses so deep and so well armed the emergent just was not born a woman
but should she a product I blossom white along a nerve line explosive only hope isn’t always this private so give me a name & not the one my mother gave me white gloves this white skin has a cunt-hold so hard these teeth just scrape it over simply to sit still the inside
when inverted the soldier’s identity a protrusion you can stuff into anything I can still name the punched one so hard I designates the chest just cut the nipple milk-less and suck it anyway sometimes images are just another kind of captivity meaning they filled it full for so long it left a lip trail wherever they leaked
so sick they stiched the spine down a fluid caught up in bunches I spat then spasms the flower they shot through a story into whose heroine thick in the throat mine own voice box more like a vein pulled too tight to puncture the sun-mouth spread in the heat just like jasmine a smell meaning love like I might let you live in my body
just to slow the heart rate red sequins on a bare blouse the vagus nerve taut so I tenses in the guts & the body switches to an afferent pain no matter the organ when undressed in the mouth it glistens as if they a slide but what will you call me soldier when I starfish split in half only to bud again will you salt me?
belief in the mother not would the good mouth goad me on but having left oppression some form tucked up tight in the belly as if feature by feature the manipulation between male and an idea distorted to such an extent the materialist presents herself as historical when elsewhere the eunuch lives outside of sociological facts bodies for the same reason not determined by the past but rather ridden into it
the Pegasus once omnivorous eats the gazelle, bones and all, a new housing to host a syntax last spring belly down and legs just opening and closing could it kissing split so as to mouth it like a bellows a display of force on both ends as if sired by a god but foaled by Medusa’s neck stallion-white even they born by blood or foam the variant when Uranus’ severed genitals and sea cast
the energy then moving off from the head to the will fire in the limbs drawn as we are to hybrids the second self always guiding from positions that appear retrospective in consciousness but never seems to emerge seamless even the liminal persona having left one form while not fully having entered the other are socially invisible bringing with them a sense of danger
when I ran meaning the room a carpet teeming through a smell so stiff so far having fallen they teased it down three fold the head can only turn so far one holding it at an angle not manageable by hard bone while the other a mattress & a tongue so thick that fire ate my throat stallion or something vibrating with no vocal folds
like saying sweet flower over and over in my ear until barely perceptible this fist when knuckled he laughs after all so nothing but pony up boy that scent had stuck on the hand the blood worn off too soon and one of them practicing kindness by rubbing my cheek gently like a willow while the others were stuffing a river into my voice box roared but travels downstream
what I mean to say is no mother having moored my mouth brought cover over me like a hood shield the will and the physical body bulges holding the shame until it presses so far out the boundary can no longer hold as in Tiresias so burdened by cock he hammered the serpents conjured a cunt and called it punishment as if every body’s being weren’t just dependent upon the balance of
self love meaning the flower of “first” love meaning to seek out something sumptuous and in so doing disorient the ritual process like getting lost in a lover just because desire can be physical but symbolism after all is a spiritual practice think about anything long enough and you can actually conjure it into being just because there’s a tiger running in the picture don’t believe everything you feel bears a chase
the tiger itself is equally cognitive not this insistence in manipulation exactly but don’t you want to be my fantasy? spirit as it incarnates to say their bone is forever ingrained in my mind is not to say I have turned their object over in my mouth though I get why this might read as typically masculine but take my voice from me and everything penetrates “in real life”
pleasure then has its own rewards the captive condemned to repeat events what rags get rearranged each time I revisits to stiff the dress relax and pull the cloth aside see what happens its true the pant pushes tight and that part extended was something to like a little the past ass up and hands pulled straight in the air face down like some kinetic flower dangling its fumes
signs of the same elements soldier one nailed the suffering to a cross we carry with us called me bleeding heart from behind cupping the throat so hard the breath is nothing to lose sight of in the light of awareness hope isn’t all that long to listen for birds in my ear budding like maybe a swallow with steady repetition spirals around each time hitting the point with greater acuity breath releasing in spurts so no longer capable of communicating with precision
or muscles with constant steady action what is pleasure when force can look a lot like something wanted sedation helps the process stop the breathing and sleep on how we turn away from images of a traumatic event only to reemerge with a secret language the second soldier having assumed the position of a wheel with no vertical action hung low and arm deep so don’t
not now or maybe even never knowing how to unfold the way to strap on a life can slam its teeth and all meaningful connections go to chaos so I could graze with energy but still agate forms layers through pressure as if even he were trying to tucked up tight inside the uterus and tension from the inside released like some ecstatic miner found the well tainted excreted itself in some bullshit sound about harmony the third soldier dragged by leg my face a trauma that involved being cold like a mineral
because I can be what you want is rarely a reasonable statement the carcass gets carved no matter who holds the knife and anyway there is only one of me I think the numbers do not matter no money could account for the smell of that smile as they tore it and sky kept coming in through the window what good then is privacy if chords seize so silence is something so acrid a stone placed on the solar plexus helps with acceptance by overcoming those emotions one wants to remove
when something you are seeking versus what you become the last soldier snowdrop star-spreads a light and squeezed it just a little until a sound comes out there was nothing I could do but any efforts to drive out consciousness when certain body sensations or god knows there is no when into the light of awareness just like arms muscled into my mouth with so many other tongues unspeakably the songs that were playing or regions of memory and several blankets later could clean me in want of something more like housing a mytheme between my legs the white like bitter rind
rings around an unchanging language system that closes itself down when the will is removed action gets depicted as structural plants that grow into the sun but when the event isolated repeats as if placing calendula directly on the wound soothes the memory open until more than symbolic damage remains but is less than the phenomenon itself just as one hopes nettles might bring milk to the surface
drops left on the skin of the belly he would say kadupul flower and rubbed it in to purge the burden of discreet materials the never alive for very long after having been picked of it so one can say desire itself kills the blossom soldier four having relieved himself quickly of any excess want simply acted as tethers or yoke depending on how you look at it
of the bundle itself nerves gathered like a possible unit of sound the I gasps and nothing will ever be the same deposit the straps could tighten or loosen depending on your style meaning thread the needle the skirt hitches and it too can be used as a gag an image whose only significance is to illustrate a certain level of shared resources to give the pig a poke so to speak the trick is what was hidden
the vine then blossoms at night emitting a calming fragrance reminiscent of still that sky through the window the light that came in fits when pulling pain down in time to their breath until I doesn’t quite know where it begins but open up for me tulip sounds a bit like any angel in heaven promising rue for grace so later it was hard to remember precisely which words were used when how can I take you with not these dark seeds but stuck in my mouth my back just waiting to be painted
to perform an absence both internal and external the idea of destruction is necessary as though the head not fit for consumption fires all on its own the fifth soldier dressed with dandelions waved his gun like warfare could flower and ground it straight into the floorboards the dogwood outside in the wind the rain spats the word after word after word after word of the singer stretched all the way down the spine until the lyrics too were ramming the event persistent with my presence
and pulls then the day back down into its own body a force so striking that sanctions let loose rapid fire and did I mention his hips just another form of gravity those bones for bright star hands pinned to the wall and one of them laughs like a hound covered in heat so steadily I mistook the musk for wolf and made the cut just below the rib to purge the parts I doesn’t plan to keep not long after he spits and says I can marry a ghost if I like but already I have want at the bottom of a deep well thistle dark with red jewels bobbing and unsightly
just because I’m not staring off into some deep ocean sunset but all those selves well that’s the thing I like to watch it happen but I like to play dead too so saddle up flower in your mouth mother and I will suck it out every time I promises pollen plays a part in this story I mean he has hands that could jerk just about anything into discharge as when in the process of healing one might find a natural release and that has to count for something just a little slower than cocked and always ready to fire
after all the body is elastic a position in which one’s knees are bent and heels touching the buttocks just at the top of the thigh every time it happened to settle some uninhabited soul that needed rapture and several mustangs later every possible meaning has its dick out learning to love like some ghost painted on the floor of just about every room I’ve ever been in but rubyfruit you could never make me happy you simply haven’t got the lungs to bring that foul air home
so say me sister and will you know don’t wipe it all over your face but like you mean it isn’t just something to thank you swallow without confessing first where was it when you crying came to ride it how hard it had wings all over and no way to sit still so they threw it down like just another piece of trash and he with so much more value so I’m sure you can smell it from there I’ve seen it all over your face
a flower then almost completely made by hands known to have a delicate taste more like honeysuckle than a jackfruit would that it were moonlight not this sun-like jack hammer don’t you come riding back into this painting blazing straight out the hole held open so they could aim it in and any other words to suggest you saved something at the heart of the matter like pain doesn’t really have a plot but is action oriented remove the dead bones of emotion and the wolf in this story stuffs her own belly with the bodies of every soldier she suffers exhaustion can happen effortlessly take kratum for example it can encourage euphoria where the tingling is usually brief and contentment comes easily
or to shame the eye threaded brocade deep stitches time together with slip knots Ophelia then in order to purge trauma of sensations something simple like the white dress laid by willow branch to branch rid the body of physical pain floats freely to the surface only after the desire not to skin oneself alive exactly but to find it annihilated as if to say im done with these now as if to say these are all mine
Rebecca Stoddard is a poet living in Sonoma County whose work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, Horse Less, Modern Review, etc. Her chapbook Home? was published by Noemi Press.
