homebody
after Marianne Moore
days after the dead-wasp landed on your lycra’d
leg you stand next to the kitchen-hob with a clay-
cracked sponge squeezing grey through your head
in a slew of torpid plops below the glyptic
incision the small black lines
twitch blank through the pillowy grooves of lassitude
when on the left-end of your eye-tip a shape
impinges in miniature
like a valley on a button
like the mottled stasis of paint-streaks fixing a flame
there interposes a snail
a mud-hole prised open by a conical spiral of sunlight
the snail-shell finds you through your soft narcosis in the kitchen
and naturally you assume
the little beast’s dead or severed from its vestibule
but then you see the punctiform
edge of a tentacle poke
its thread-thin way out into the fissile
exterior out beyond its half-hidden form
and you wonder at its horn’s
register compared to your own occipital stand-
point as you place the reflective
blade of a palette-knife under this other life
and take it on a journey out the back door
The Dinner Party
Flutes clink in the glossy front-face
of the frontier where balsamic drizzles
stickily under sugar-dusted air
and dainty conversations trot across
the ironed cover of crisp-cloth.
Here, in the slick veneer, we curl
cake-forks through the flesh-fissures
of stiffly shut fists
All the better to eat you with, my dear.
and prick the pepper-honeyed glaze
of pork terrine, pliant as tinned
baby-food, all goo and garnish.
Greased chimeric piglet lips
shimmer like the blushing rot
of apple-skin. Pursed pieholes ring
giddily round fillets so slippery
they cut up like cream.
My dear, come near, do you understand what is happening?
The insurgent root of a tooth
spasms inside its gummy enclave.
Pop a painkiller. Erase raised nerve.
Not the time nor the place,
what with little mounds of nuts
desiccated atop the blood-gold crust
of peach brûlée, and the lip-smacked
shovel of the silver-spoon.
this is made of oil this is made of oil this is made of oil
Oil-globules coat the flab-seams
of our cheeks like cling-film,
or the crude glint of black ooze
splitting the sea into petro-archs.
Puffed chests and fudged
ham-fists masque-a-raid in the mise
en abyme, inter-slurring sense
to purely puerile discord.
when there’s dirt between the dirt
We set the tonal range with the jingle-
jangle of the bells on our toes,
pealing under the flaky crust
of layers of dead skin.
Perched on the cushy bolster
of a see-saw, we self-insulate
against its ricochets in shells
and swallow the jellied morsels
like a little egress
in one fell swoop,
theatrical as a disappearance-act.
But underground a sound
emerges, uncoiling like a wave.
A stethoscopic gurgle from the gut’s
lodged lining. The glottal pop
of a pustule under a caked face.
The fricative whisk of human skin
when the walls of the mind grow thin
interfolded through synthetic
yellow glue. The dilatory gasp
of the blood-jet broiling inside
its froggy, throttled heart.
Like a burst pipe, or the fire
throat of water, spilling all over
the walls, all over the other side
of subterfuge.
___________
Blaise Sales is a poet and PhD student at the University of Leeds, where she co-edits the journal Poetry and Audience. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Consilience and The WRoCAH Journal. She runs a postgraduate poetry writing group called ‘Kerning’ and tweets at @blaise_sales.
These poems were selected by Anthropocene Guest Editor Tom Branfoot.
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