Stella Brice


Downward

My feet press on the living grave:
Corpses of
bugs & mammals & the lightless
bacteria that croak down there.
Death runs
beneath my plot. My
skin. My hollowing
bones.
I am
so beautiful because
I cannot stay.


Poor Hansel

No one knows that
Witch dressed Hansel in Gretel’s clothes.
It made her horny when he wore a skirt.
Poor Hansel.
It was
for him
an exquisite
time…
Rich as fudge when
Death Herself sits
on a stool outside your cage
& waits
for you to ripen.


Our Home Is Bleeding

A man fell into a sinkhole
last night that opened
in the middle of his house.
His woman slept
in the other room.
Workers had to remove
the collapsed structure bit
by bit to extract the limp
body.
This is no legend.
Sometimes a man falls into a hole
one night while he is reading a stupid
book.
The woman cries & cries into the bowels
But he will never rise
through the dark air
Singing the way the under
taught him.

-all poems previously published in Radiant Turnstile


At Night, Long Ago

I’d get stoned in mirrors.
Stoned on the shape of
my own foot.

There was nothing at stake.

I kept my kitchen in a box. My closet—a pink sheet.
My desert boudoir—a vanilla candle.

Every night I’d rummage my
self like a mysterious trunk.

Kissing books with fervor when
I finished them. I pressed my lips like Islam
to the front, the spine, the back.

Anais Nin, Plath, Jack Kerouac.


Her Snaky Locks

I remember a box of sanitary pads
that rested on my mother’s toilet
tank.

They were called “Modess”—
a name that means nothing but

Sounds full of
qualities.

For the white pad
must be
righteous
as an armored
virgin

As it shields the world against
the medusa
of your blood.

-both poems previously published at Frigg Magazine