Stella Brice
　

At Night, Long Ago

I’d get stoned in mirrors.
Stoned on the shape ofmy 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.
　

Billy Underground

Every day at recess the albino boy
digs a hole in the dirt & rests his face there.

He buries his face in the hospice dirt
to escape all that stabbing.

He parleys with the Ants.
With the Queen of the Ants,
his mouth down in the ground.

She sits on her inexplicable
throne of worked filigree &
bristles her precious antennae.
The Queen speaks perfectly to the worm-white boy.
She speaks perfectly to him.

He can only really breathe good in the dark.

His agony turned to the glory
of the underground.
　

How Is God?

On my pink geranium
I find a sealed
mud vase―small as a tip.
A cocoon for an insect that might sting me.

So I crush it & a neon worm gropes
my life line blindly amidst the shatters
of its home. I have wrecked
its incubation & now it shrivels
in the raw air.
I throw this mess onto the ground.

I am big.
I have done wrong
like God does wrong
With his armies of thick; & dirty blood tubes; &
steel fences raping in waves.
(The villager with her hands thrown
in front of her face.)

God is bad.

He gorges Himself
on worship. On fear.
It’s a goblet feast
for His table.

I say
God is bad.

-all poems previously published at Frigg Magazine