Match. Helen Guri

ablaze.

      My lines grow more shameless with time,

       I’m the proverbial bulldozer.

      Tell me, do you come here

      to bathe in pure Gewürztraminer,

       and, days later, show the tub ring to your mother?

       Mine’s buried three leagues upstream

       from the one we’re in now.

      You seem a little out of it too –

      but by this age, let’s be honest,

      we’ve both swallowed villages.

      You’d think I’d stop apologizing

       and level the field.

      Sure, I agree it could never work anyway,

       what with your absence of interest

       in my bronto-thesaurus, the brass thumbtacks

       of my private whirlpool.

      The myth of our obsolescence is hardening.

      There may not even be time enough

       to fling rotini between the bucktoothed canyons,

       melt lettuce to lace negligee,

       and depart like racing slugs

      from each other’s cracked lips.

      And I just remembered my mortal fear

       of addressing the opposite sex –

       it has to do with my aversion

       to upslopes, my latent acne of the soul.

      I’ll be off now to my hole under the hill.

      But if it’s any consolation, I’ll treasure

      the might as well you seem to cough to your palm as I go. Seismographs will sense how I scorch all the way home on my own steam at the very idea.

      NATURE MORTE

      All breeze stalls mid-cough,

       so the fumes of coffee

      floss the room, and the plume

       of Greta’s voice on the phone

      steadies like a feather.

      I know her voice is the shape of a wishbone

      thanks to a third person

       who lay still as grapes in a bowl

      while intrepid physicians mapped

       a diagram of chords

      in what could have been anyone’s gorge.

      SLIP-UPS

      And Brian drops his full mug of coffee from a height:

       Shit-whoops-damn! Hot white splinters in a stimulant tsunami.

      But he doesn’t really mind –

       his bending a chance to ogle Greta’s ankles,

       scooting toward him like brooms.

      She kneels to read the inkblots

       on his jeans, while he gleans advice on their removal.

      Everyone agrees it’s no big deal.

      The incident bleeds into the ledger

       of bloopers, office gossip,

       which runs on tit-for-tat to infinity:

      Last week Greta made out, as by accident,

       with a pucker not her husband’s,

       and Brian plucked a nylon string itch

       with the publisher’s daughter.

      (It was her funnel-shaped breasts.

      Alcoves, we are meant to imagine,

       like a lick of Manchego cheese.)

      But something funny is happening to the puddle on the floor.

       Like a dropped object returned to its pocket,

       or a skunk turning to light at the spine as it streaks

       across lawn, the dark liquid vanishes,

       resets to an invisible web of tripwires throughout the room.

      I keep very still, hold my place

       like something nearly caught by spiders,

       or like the would-be thief

       of a large and opulent piece of art.

      REVISION

      Let me be perfectly clear.

      It is not a triangle I mean but

       three dots.

       Rash,

       Orion’s belt…

       Not

      love but inflammation.

       Wasp sting.

      Constellation.

      WALLFLOWER

      Near the dissolving edge of the garden party,

       a tulip dives up slowly

       from below ground, against gravity.

      It’s like a little-watched sporting event on rewind

       at a bar no one goes to, those pink-tinged feet

       a single bullet bound for heaven

       while the whole remainder of the universe swims on,

       undisturbed, in its habitual direction.

      Now someone presses ‘pause.’

      Stuck upside-down, a foot shy

       of solid ground and wearing nothing

       but the wind’s leotard,

       the tulip must turn her feet into a head,

       her mind into toes.

      She begins by rooting her fingers

      under the heavy metal cabinet of the earth.

      Her torso is as spare as the twine between

       two tin cans. Now the other end is talking,

       or trying to. Listen, and you might barely hear

       the arches of her feet

       rehearse the embouchures of speech

       surreptitiously to the air.

      You are right to be suspicious.

      By the time her eyesight rights itself,

       she’ll be a periscope spying for the underground.

      She’s building a subterranean fortress

       lit by multiplying bulbs and

       powered solely by the stationary cyclone

       of her mental gymnastics.

      The breeze is her own personal brand

       of highly flammable hairspray.

      She’s shrewdly packed her appetite

       in one of those green tortoiseshell valises.

      When the party goes shits-up, her getaway

      car will come on tiptoe.