Revenge
“The more ugly, old, vicious, ill, poor I get, the more I want to take my revenge by producing a brilliant color, well arranged, resplendent. Jewelers get too old and ugly before they learn how to arrange precious stones well.” – Vincent Van Gogh
It won’t be walking into light.
The dead who come back remember howling wind.
The mouth corked with ash, and the eyes.
I am the ugliest of jewelers, my work
glowers from tarnish-clouded settings.
Carbuncles warm the groin,
and a stone from the hyena’s rainbow-pinwheel iris
tells the future, which gathers like mirror rot.
I watch it, jaundiced as windows
painted yellow to mark houses of apostates.
Teens fling soup at a Van Gogh
in protest of big oil (of oils?). Slashed tomato-red,
the sunflowers wither anyway. Chrome yellow
lavished on the little space
of the painter’s only season
of joy, the light infects it. It browns
like snow in the Frankenstein summer.
This summer, my revenge body goes naked.
All the dresses my ex zipped me out of
blacken with toxic dye, witch-bitten.
She was a figure at sunset pointing
to her magnificent shadow. “That’s me!” Brought
the party, hammed a toppy dirtbag bit
in a wedding’s gradient of illness,
emoji yellow bridesmaids, mustard, caca dauphin.
Together we cruised the lemon chiffon one.
Petted wrist to waist to lemon hem
till I lost them both in blinding pollen.
Precious stones rained one night
on a poet and the woman he loved
in their separate dreams in separate cities.
Children of Venus ate peacock as if
its hundred eyes would open in them, and I
could’ve been compound, princess-cut,
seen her from all angles at once. Found her
strutting, living-history museum actor of herself,
Lemon Chiffon blinking in the glow
of her attention. They didn’t see me.
Glazed like babies on the world’s milkiest tit.
“New love,” she’d tweet, “is a silly, thrilling thing!”
Let dreams fall on them like snow on Venus,
made of lead. Let pages yellow
like jawbones of poets in the Nightmare’s eyrie
feathered by prophetic birds. They would sing
of artificial noons. Bastard-amber
stage bulb where a sun was, muffled by smoke.
Smoke blows goldfinches from the sunflowers.
It squats on the lake like a bad memory.
Smoke blows my friends wide open,
through a meal one is spoon-feeding his father,
through clumps of another’s hair
falling out as her daughter squalls.
They have traded their peace
for a love their bodies can barely accommodate.
Sunflowers dry out, charred as aftermath,
and go on demanding violet
as a shade demands its afterimage, as Salem girls
laced into black wool screamed
for yellow birds and dogs, red Bibles, red bread.
I am raging in junk and swarf,
heart skewbald as an altar
to the god of messages, wanting to tell her
what the light is like
through a haze of distant wildfire.
Green of Flame
The artist before he died of plague
ground irises to green paint,
meaning love because
it wouldn’t last, because it turned
like something neglected in the fridge.
Vert de flambe, green of flame. Once
I leaped over a bonfire into strange arms.
Rocked on sooty heels as he took me from behind
while girls cast flower crowns on the river
to see in them a future husband’s face.
Red stitched around their collars kept out evil.
I was green as the flame of the irises
bearded like comets in their season of obscenity.
Green tail through a constellation’s groin.
Green brides in a book of hours,
vines in their bridles. Ormolu gilded them
like blouses flimsy as wishful thinking,
as if their faces were my future.
I had two options: quiet woundedness,
well-fed maneater smirk at best.
Beware of me when I wear green! A pregnant woman
overwhelming her tube top at the feminist bookstore
offered me ice cream cake, which I picked at
with miserable appetite, never learning
what we were celebrating. Not any identity,
prospect I circled cloudily like water around a drain.
Gay green, gaudy green, lost green, green week
of the rusalka who’d fashion herself
after the women I wanted most,
then bind me with her hair to drown.
Sap green. I made a hundred bucks
watching porn in an MRI!
Years ago. Buttons for my response—Strongly Like,
Like, Neutral, Dislike, Strongly Dislike—to that flesh
so bare it was sexless. My strongest likes
plashed dumb and viridescent in my lizard brain.
I favored Neutral. Neutered
in modesty’s bonnet? Did the scan prove I lied?
I send a message, says the iris. Even now
I can’t say why the sap rises
in me when it does
or it doesn’t. Sphinx
Taupe bra, Satellite Lilac panties (both
vague griege) discarded, a man found me dry.
Finger to temple, he said, “You’re too stuck in here,”
but desire’s coordinates kept shifting: head, cunt, gut.
Or I was in it: peat bog digesting sacrifices,
hedge maze, an awful loosening
as the seabed drops out under the swimmer.