from AND THEN WE SAW THE DAUGHTER OF THE MINOTAUR

 

I have brought the monster to the window.  An urge to burn the female filament singes lace curtains.  These three, the dead, the living and the in-between, return me briefly to a strategy of horsey recoveries.  You can’t say vagina that way anymore.  Say another elsewhere.  Open the broom, sticks with sorceries, I’m sold.  Get the groceries and ride the saddle home.  Tell paper souls to airplane Hollywoods.  One forever evening sun swaths paint in lines across a gendered world, the grenadine one, genred daubs of swans in graceful necks of man-made soil.  See the length of mine?  It echoes within their reach, sets their teeth to chatter.  The scars they make also ache with mountains.  But paper souls take place?   Then lay me, slay my take-over, use up space, today, dear pervert.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE DOUBLE-EDGED IMAGE

 

Their capes billow out, small winds, cloudless, for sale.  A boiling broth from wooden flutes attests to her branch of success.  We hear like equations.  She is all almond eyes.  She is the breath lying gently beneath my rib-caged tongue.  She reaches out from one uniformed position, a girl bicycling up from a beehive tower, mortared with wings that carry Europa.  She turns, her bowler hat, to heed the call everywhere there is none.  The ancient buzz of nothing.  I am omnipresent, inside her, I hear like fishes the underwater manner of vision.  I am too masterful for knowledge.  Dark birds attend from the index of the double-sided image.  Wings and the sun.  We return after dusk, heads filled with numbers, to grow branches between worlds on the backs of nurtured equations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I ride that small hairy boat through mountain caves with one-handed figures, until her flesh takes on the pallor of a fleur-de-lis pattern.  My feet turn to wooden hands; I paddle the domestic isolation. The sail grinds star matter into pabulum; the crescent moon keeps up, captive in a cage on deck.  We minister to that baby caged, feed her the veiled layers of solar melodies in shadow.  Nothing escapes the painter!  She does not draw a line without the signatures from fairy tales, spinners, material masters of ethereal star splatter.  Soul-gauze is a two-way veil we seek the real in.  In the matter of sleep’s posterior wake, she orchestrates everything.

 

 

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Of Amy King’s most recent book from Litmus Press, I Want to Make You Safe, John Ashbery described her poems as bringing “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living.” King conducts interviews for VIDA: Woman in Literary Arts and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.   She was also honored by The Feminist Press as one of the “40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism” awardees.  Visit her online for more.