Corinne Lee
　

The Narrows

If you're planning on vanishing, you telegraph,
holding my fist, leave hard.
Leave hypersonic.
I'm brim weary of your spooked
prance. But I'm too fat and fraudulent
for that. For last nightand my plea,
once again unmet,
for you husbandly thighs, their sandstone
and codex. And for this too pearl morning,
our daughter
with a swallowtail's antenna that shudders, bend-breaks
as she slides
her matchbox closed. Silent witchery. Such casual
harm. I want to be fished
from this airstream
by a picturesque giant, his slingshot aquiver,
and then buttered
with petals. A close second: I snuff the butterfly
with ether, a merciful slaughter.
To ensure observation's
remote kiss. Our child
strokes wings' lemon powder, rubs
dull iridescence on my cheeks,
lips. The nourishment of decadence,
its comfort just before
an end.
　

Lysistrata Motley

Even the quitch loves, sashaying
belly-blade to blade-belly
when wind is low. Most days,
we fail to notice
that elusive, Rastafarian
canoodle. The poems
therefore darting away, sunken,
through the halls.
Our words becoming escapes,
not spoor. Why can't
our selves intersect
with the exterior?
Because something is sclerotic,
strung high
in the Burundi
Salvador trees. Where dewdrops
are slaver. Listen up:
The Egyptians jettisoned
a mummy's cerebrum, knowing
the heart should do
all thinking.
　

Ten Cents A Dance

Send out 100,000,000 electrons,
one by one, and tracewith paint
the pathway
of each journey. When merged,
their terminus art
is a seaweed tangle,
but vaulting.
Cathedral of netting. Unlike
this chapel crate
at the children's hospital. Huzzah,
a priest, milky way
of pretentious statements
against a jazzy background.
Jesters careening
from room to room,
on bicycles made
of hay, while my daughter
wails. Wasn't it the goal
of Venus
to seduce, to gavotte
with Death? Can't begin
the dance. Digitata, nori, alaria,
dulse. Come wrap
this mother and her glue seep, nail
pocks. Wearing her faulty construction
under klieg lights,
for everyone
to see.

-all poems previously published at Foame

　
Lunar

A mathematician suggests the moon be exploded,
its mountains, dry seas, and craters crumbled
into a universe suddenly without menstruation,
croissant, moonbow, and hunting goddess wild
with breasts. He calculates Earth will teeter,
dimming inconvenient tides and slaying
seasons, the result summer eternal and glories
of wheat, cosmos redesigned for deathless
productivity. Afterward, without respite from
sparkling sun and blithe birds, no one ignites
bonfires or sings, because black oblivion and hush
are no longer the pith of everything, and even the
mathematician wearies of lips grimacing with
happiness, stained by berries, each mouth a clown’s
pert smear of pretense and lifeless, dried crimson.
　

The Shallowness Of Visible

There is more life below ground than above,
so perhaps we are
on the wrong side of the world
and should be star-nosed moles,
wiggling the celestial
because it is part of us
and of the darkness;
our firmament, instead, is distant:
exotic specks and swirls
seen only when night masks
the glare without mercy
on our upright, fragile,
and unadorned heads.

-both poems previously published at Red Booth Review