A Poem by Joyelle McSweeney
by Mark Bibbins, Editor
Hellebore
1.
run it again
double the charge
what’s the damage
sign for it
the universe wheels around in its dishevelment
like an afternoon drunk
rolls a wild eye which is a loophole
everything crawls out or goes in after it
this endtime’s gonna last awhile
a cartoon toucan flies through the chemo suite
dripping sugar loops from its beak
it’s on life support, on repeat
its ink flows antigravitational
flinks from its flank
both a ballpoint pen and a butane lighter
also useful for tracheostomy
an astronaut writes a cheque
a digital door swings open
debt falls out like breasts from the cargo bay
inside the jumpsuit
a port fails
starving bears revolve on ice floes
the nest of ivs snakes like a flexible crown
take it out on the holidays
write back from the front
I am quite well/in hospital
send that lotion I like
my hat is jumping out of my brain
my groin joists groan in the wind
pigeonhole egghole hammer staples my skull
carts around a trunkload of busted audio equipment
I can’t excise
onion scapes
do something remarkable in the dark
only grow away
grow through everything
like toenails in the grave
point the way
demolish
is a word I learned from my mickey mouse dictionary:
the greenhouse is demolished
a political word
a representation of donald duck’s anger
in denmark his name is anders and
anders and
a feathered fist
anders and
a convulsive contract
anders and a general contractor
anders and like a universe
slashes his own greenhouse
and anger
fangs the rose
with glass
2.
the rose
who has been quietly manufacturing her own fangs
now wears a diadem of damage on the upended tubs
of fungicide and bone meal
if you label it ‘poison’ they will use it to kill themselves
because they love to read labels
and use things
those humans
and want to drown in the sea
of the Internet
like Freud said
luckless civilians
citizen army
spirit level in the pitted brain
kill me with the farming equipment
kill me with that ashbery poem
farm implements and rutabagas in a landscape
the British call them swedes
carve them up and put a candle there
on the face a chancre grows
a chancre of light
a sad sarcoma
that sags from the wink
fagged out
like fruit loops the beak of a toucan
or fish hooks the mutilated pelican
the hard ‘c’ catches the breath and throws it back
the hard ‘o’ sucks the exhaust pipe of industry
its lipstick is made of arsenic
leached from lead tailings
left over from a mining operation
and adorns the headless mountain with bright pools
we call that rigor mortis because it has such ethical rigor
like simone weil’s heartwall breaking down becoming broth
to feed the rest of the starving body
when the teenager seizes in the driveway, her hatchback
glides down into traffic on its own
its precious stew of heartwall leaching into the bloodstream
this poem forgot to be good
that teenager forgot not to die
those two girls in Uttar Pradesh probably hung themselves
that mango tree colluded
that mango tree forgot to be ethical
listing its face
towards a corona
it was trying to see around
it was trying to see around its burden
it was trying to blink out its blastoma
it was trying to comb the hair of the comet from
inside its sclera, uvea and retina
where its bloodwalls were branching in its eyes
its trunk turning to stone
who streaks the sky
with her long hair out behind
what prodigy
and besides
who gapes
who gags
who knifes open a gut to study what’s clutched there
lets empty out the ocean
to store our plastic beads there
razor handles, mylar balloons
and other indigestibles:
the fear of being a bad poem
the fear of a sole that would crush the palisade layer
the fear of a truncheon that would smash down the facebones
those onion domes and slender minarets
the fear of a bullet that would mark all the chests
with its redline, its markdown, its infinitesimal expense
Joyelle McSweeney’s Dead Youth, or, The Leaks, a verse play starring Julian Assange on the high seas, is out now from Litmus Press.
You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at [email protected].