Poem Against Matt Guenette's Ex-Girlfriend

Cape of Flies, memory manufactured
in Hong Kong, you have turned over
a new bridge, and you have burned
the leaves, and I think I met you once
in Carbondale, when I drove in from Iowa
to watch Matthew read the poem
of the famous chihuahua's nuts, and after
the reading, back at Matt's, Matt
brought out the picture of his brother,
drunk at a party in Ames, waving
his cock like a wand amid mixed
and unsuspecting company, as if, thus
and presto, he'd turn them all to frogs,
and I recall a woman in that picture,
off to one side, looking calmly down
at the sudden penis with a jeweler's
studied eye. Though it was not you
I remember you as that pictured girl,
caught acquisitive, hands on hips, eyes
locked in and pupils superfluous
with light. Then I moved to Virginia Beach
to teach and write, and a couple
months later, walking beneath the bridge,
I knelt to pick up a snarled bikini top
and when I pulled it from the sand
I heard a click, and found myself
caught as backdrop in a picture, just taken,
of a Navy man and wife. I imagine
them now, the Navy man back from duty,
the two of them safely couched
and sifting through vacation photographs,
their happy faces turning strange
to see me crouching on the beach
behind them, throwback avatar looking straight
past the camera, hoarding the empty cloth
as if it were the shed template of God
or further proof against the sun,
and next morning, Matt sent me the poems
in which you first appeared, beautiful
and burning at various stakes, sweet
and lovely right down to your bubbling
candy heart. I did not know you then, and I do
not know you now, Matt's ex-girlfriend,
abstract, laminated bronze snuff film
shooting nightly, behind schedule,
in the crowded hook and shiv factory
where memory is housed. Two days later
I would run up that treacherous beach,
my right hand on fire, a fluke sting-ray
tail-spike buried in my palm, and that night,
drunk enough to take out my own
cock in public, the puncture wound
on my palm a third-string irony
at best, I wrestled my bedroom
door off its hinges, walked it down
to the beach, and spoke of domesticity
beguiled. Would you believe me
if I told you I met a woman that night
who reminded me of you, who walked up
blond and resonant during my back-
assward sermon in the dunes? I didn't.
It was me and the cat-shit and the ghost
crabs, my sick hand fat and yellow
as a life raft, and three years have passed,
and you have labored under different
names, but sometimes, say if I've been
working all night, my fingers
will stiffen and curl, and I can feel the rough
black muscle of that antique fish
still twitching in my wrist, dictating
the vague, submarine compositions
of pilchard oil and trash, and I can
shut my eyes and see Virginia Beach,
the epileptic coast pole-axed
by an acetone surf, the sun-block
sealing off each body from the next,
and memory the air-tight junk fish
poking like a stylized font from the sand.




All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.