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.