from Merry Widow



Setting:

1930s dustbowl America, rural. Flat flat flat far as forever.
Everything parched and coughing, waiting for Girl to enter.
Dun color scheme, all scenery caked in earth.

Characters:

Girl- placid blue-eyed thing, Pisces, slick like sea
and just as curled up at the edges.

bone-thing- you'll see.


Afterwards my gut is pinched in; a slut. This bone-thing appears
twice in one day under the guise of carnage. I watch it twist
and caw on the porch, extending slatternly neck towards spazzing
light bulbs. It performs for me-- hobbled ballet scratches on sycamore
planks and a fistful of down gnashed between teeth.
Teeth, it reminds me, are for cornering wet bitches in-- then stops:
I've been hooked.


--------------------------------------------------for cornering wet----------------
--------------------------------------------------------- bone-thing on the porch,
me, mammal--------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------It was last night or the night before.

It was eleven years ago, I thought?

For cornering wet bitches in cooed at just the right pitch after impalement
leaves me drooling on the ground, unquestionably pathetic. Bone-thing gets off
on my tawdry spilling and settles into the porch swing for a show:

Scene One

When performing I put on the glitz,
wriggly ductile hips bucking
while my left hand goes for blood.

On the porch, writhing: I sure do like a bone-thing who can gab like THAT!

Turn my right wrist
next to my face, which is pushed
into the floor. Ass in the air,
calves stretched taut in heels---

Grinding towards sky, crowing: “For cornering wet bitches in!”


It came in March; I was elated----------------------------------------------------


Before I hung out loose as the swing of an arm; now all tight I preen good.
Slather on some girl colors still fixed like that. Bone-thing likes to watch!
Rise up and tangle like muscle!

Something different is in me.

This is how it came to me: on the dry, dry sand bone-thing lay,
light-bleached and solemn. When I walked through one day
it was weeds for miles, it was a town, it was dry. And bone-thing
wasting there alone. It followed me home and afterwards I was a slut,
I was pinched in.












Gina Abelkop lives in New York with her pug Ava, where she edits the feminist literary and arts journal Finery. She has previously published in DIAGRAM, Stirring, Softblow, Hothouse, Lodestar Quarterly, 42Opus, and MiPOesias. www.birdsoflace.com






                       BACK