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Roxanna Bennett :: Four poems


The Morality Tourniquet, Lunar Edition

       O Serket, mother of scorpions
              She Who Causes the Throat to Breathe
                     your daughter is a snake sack harrowed

Does your bird-headed brother make house calls
       Liquefy my last meal, masticate my nicked snack,
a bad seed squeezed from a cinched shut cannula   
  
Shed skin ribbons shake loose the formula
              for The Morality Tourniquet, Lunar Edition
                     O Serket, wonder blossoms wombward

but I am more patina, scale-skittering layers
              unwound than fact, more ether than spider
                            I am turtles, turtles all the way down


Restoration of the Electrical Girl

The grave pit was a womb
       for this miniature red necessity,

eggs armstumps, perforated
       bellybreasts, mother folded,

       pressed, embryo in a matrix
typical         Grave inventory:

       dream dread, spindle whorl,
       deathwatch beetle mandible

Autumn harvested incest
              among the animals   Elektra,

              vine of heaven, withdrew
in sorrow         Concubine

       to the dead world conscious,
not a grand model or a single

       answer to the process,
the Great Magician reborn

              rooted to rise against
       her own dark sister 

{egg as prophecy of bird rib}


Buns up, Sister Rose

Doctor Frankenstein fucked up when he fracked
          a ladyrubberbag, not glad to be
                    a rag hand at any man’s stag, meat parts,
                              sawn head & a bum leg from a handsy

                              drunkle: “shiny nickel for a poke poke,
          find the pickle”      Pop a wheelie, son, pick
a bubbling shovel, ditch full of Amway
                              soap-on-a-rope, papa Pope a sketchy

                    devil, cut tooth on a fickle rabble
          Buns up, Sister Rose, is this your show me,
                    don’t tell me, what do any of you know
                              about creation     “I could bend that chick

                                        over the desk & knock her up right now,
                                                  pump her fuck tunnel chock full of chuds—                                                                                                                        

                                       that’s art” said the rapist      Who isn’t? Teeter 
                              another teetotaller, trumped up on

                                                            the hood of a parked car & we are
                              all that toddler suffocating, slow drown
                                                            in wet air & a wonder, sad wonder,
                                        a widdle whimper, a sweaty trickle,

                              a shitty diaper full of who cares
          No white horse, no helicopter lift,
                              no warm lap, full belly, someplace soft to sleep
                    But there was a green place

                    A gold light, bee hum & birdsong

                              There was

                    Greenlight  Songbees
                              We were starfish arms,
                                        soft bellies shown
                              like offerings


Purplefish

Meat-a-physically, delightfully actual
           when not in pain so    Never

Never, says Hoa, Hoa says, never?

           “to search for the purplefish”
           is to grow dark with disquiet

Are incurables divergent, am I?

Translation of madness
           -or pain

Where is Anne Carson on the spectrum
           or am I projecting

divergence
           on the old cave wall

           Who speaks for the body

           w fingers & filaments
           sinuous gesture & silence

           What does your voice smell like
           How does your customary movement taste

           What tradition upheld in the highway of your spine
If I could harvest the sound of the dark

                      purplefish in vibrato
           indifferent ecstatic scraps of paper

                      No visitors
                      Nothing by mouth

           Verge            a lip quivers spills
streams of violent soldiers  

                      Not living enough
years of revision from strange to stranger

           Dr. Strange I’m not become
                      I am I am           or was

           Arms against yourself
                      your own earliness scrutinized

collages of rooms           slices of light traffic
           livingness     cables chemtrails cereal boxes

           what living in so boxes & boxes

Stanley Kubrick’s ordered boxes monolithic
                      monkey murders as fact, as accepted
                      as gendered brains in gendered bodies
                      cultureless, one brain

                      like another jarred floating           
             pickled language
can’t name the state of needs unfulfilled
           What word is that, loneliness?
One expects filled forms           certain colours

           not this      oscillation

                                 purplefish feed

           on tadpoles           under lilies
                      on McDonald’s fries
                                 scattered in the parking lot
           salt spilled &           ziggurats of rot
           out back of the supermarket
                      billions of tonnes of slick liquid
that used to be food           drowns capitals
           & the highways are empty shopping malls
           & a bloodbath of crashed pterodactyls
                                circle the


                                 in that silence
has passed us          
           & keeps going

Some possibilities should be left in the ether
twisted bicycles           atomic silhouettes

Organize against the normal

           look look at           the silence

it tastes
           like snow



Roxanna Bennett gratefully lives on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation and in the territory covered by the Williams Treaties (Whitby, Ontario). She is a disabled poet and the author of unseen garden (chapbook, knife | fork | book, 2018), The Uncertainty Principle (Tightrope Books, 2014) and Unmeaningable, forthcoming from Gordon Hill Press in fall 2019.



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where is the river :: a poetry experiment is a bi-monthly poetry journal open to a variety of aesthetics, forms and experiences, with a preference towards showcasing work by emerging writers. There is no single path, nor any single way. Founded in September 2017. Edited by Kiefer JD Logan.