Four Poems

Sara Mae

Exquisite Corpse as Burlesque Routine

This voice is a lantern with two wet fingers around a wick throat / & this voice is in first grade chanting tree ring prayers / & this voice is the violin propping up an ex’s chin / & this voice is taut & sings on command / & this voice reveals sternum one clasp at a time / & this voice won’t tell you about masturbating with an empty beer bottle not yet / The way the throat felt yes / This throat was born to lip sync / Already knows the birds to this song / The thing about being naked is where do you start / Top 40 whirlpool nipples etc but then what / If I got sick of my skin / If I peeled it off would you feed on the muscle / Would we we use it for kindling so resourceful / A bird’s nest is made of twigs & spit, but a fire is made of twigs & breath / I spit on the audience’s cheek & try to make a home of them or I tell them my secrets & knick a match on the eddies of the sound / I blow into the flames and the marigolds blink brighter / There is a garden bed I tuck into after I entertain / There are folds in my apron that stink of wildflower / I don’t want the routine to end in violence I inflict on myself / But a corpse must mind their own batter / I stir & think about my aliveness / I am sentimental that way / I have dreams of showing up in my underwear / & the crowd gets defiled

Exquisite Corpse is Led in a Body Scan to New Age Music 

I mistyped “body” as “rosy” / Yellow roses guard my open casket like a suburban fenceline / What is gratuitous violence / How is one satisfiable in violence / There is “fold” as in to crease a paper as in to allow for the chance paper cut / There is “fold” as in to give up to kneel at the river & drink what turns fish on their bellies / Even the tomatoes are alive with runic stretch marks from rain / I crack open in water as in I drool a lot in my eternal sleep / My snores open my lip lines like sidewalk to crabapple / I never understood lip liner but I think it corrals a loud mouth / I am not trapped in my dissonant body of cured yolk eyes and pickled veins / We’re in a haybale maze & which artery leads us out / The audience sucks on a caramel apple & looks up at the sky from inside / The audience is inside me, doesn’t mind the smell of wet earth / My belly rumbles with their hunger / God’s going bowling up there says the sky / My eyelashes precipitating / My gravity raining

Caudate (tail) Sonnet for Aquamarine / Siren Song

[Verse]
Earlobes adorned nonsensically cutlery
That took too long to acquire mood ring limbs
& teen magazines / wrinkled by screwdriver
Juice, Grey Goose, my half name 
In dressing rooms / 

[Chorus]
Bucking posture
Floral imposter nascent gods sipping limbo
ambrosia christening / oh petaled wraith my hummingbird
faith my good form butterfly stroke bimbo babe

[Bridge/Volta]
From here you can see the stars’ eyelashes
From here you can see where you used to live
Gummy worm ridge condom ribbed furniture t-shirt dresses

[Verse]
May I be soil for soft whims
May I be less imaginative in what to forgive 
Boundaried as amens 

[Chorus]
Nectar so saturated its synthetic
The way a name sounds obstructing my moan