Also in this issue:
Melissa's interview with Eleni
Sikilianos
review of Roubaud's Exchanges on Light
_______
Melissa's poetry and images in a previous issue
_______
_______
Grateful
acknowledgment is made to the following publications
for
poems that originally appeared in them.
The
Drunken Boat: “Fourth Wall As Spatial
Design for Lovers,” “Locus of Motion”
Laurel
Moon: “Fourth Wall As Spatial Design
for Lovers,” “Retablo in One
Gesture”
Sonora
Review:“White Hot Belly”
_______
“On the way to Patagonia 2007” photo of Melissa Buckheit
by Rebecca Seiferle 2007
“Upside Down ” by Bekka Teerlink 2000
For Olga
For Jim
And for Becky
C O
N T E N T S
Fourth Wall as Spatial Design For Lovers
With Agrimony
Married
A Few Revenge Stories
Angels' Boxes
Les fruits du matin
Simulacra
Going Out of the Gate
Monodic
Locus of Motion
Retablo in One Gesture
She May Be a Lover, May
Not
Always One Direction
White Hot Belly
Saturday
Notes
Sprig then when stronger leaf
I lie all night with her
I live where she is many
committing cleanness
the chosen chemical suffusing the harm
to the end of helping city
I'm on the side of I spread myself around
I look forward to it
I get on my knees
~
Olga Broumas & T Begley
you're
mixing paints for the new voltage
of the body How
much can you charge her before she rips
off into the night green
on blue red on orange the
difference pigment,
one teaspoon of sun jammed
down the throat of a passer-by will
not save us. The
plexiglas is a shield between you & the nude her
breasts pucker as she falls asleep in
the declining day sprawled
on the carpet, her most
intimate sleep in your gaze. You
have to wake her to
arrange the limbs again, frozen and
drowsy slightly
overweight she
is as your mother would have been if
she had been someone else a
model a woman not a wife. You
circle the house on a wish from how many directions can
you invent her, firestorm in the distance nuggets
of rock break the sky into its elements blue
from yellow our
bodies from what it takes us to get
there. The
paint feels wet through the glass it's
you alone in a room
in the lessening light suspended
in her heat, a
double image no face but hair like
a talisman for the wrong gender. I was
sunbathing on the rockface when
I said I liked you it's
easier to cross, with
our other bodies, here, performing
the functional tasks, eating sleeping,
speaking in each other's ears, ambulation.
A
nice walk is profoundly calming 6
a.m., the sun charges you a chemical bath 2
parts your palette hums in
its beauty. Otherwise
we are caustic we are
planning ourselves in
shy light the
paint covers your body charcoal on your forearms as
you throw yourself against the paper wouldn't
it be funny to mark yourself to
a plane where a woman owns
her sexual organs? Where
you fly your own body out as
the nude blissed and in terror I
watch my
breath regulating the air traveling in even waves a
daily swap with yoga in
a chair in
the yard who
can say in
which direction we will turn. In
essence what I meant was: my
elbow in
the late-night hours our soreness and this
beautiful pump of grey
music, sheet pilot and
socket.
Our bite,
raccoon in the garbage mussing up last night's supper sharp and stinging where moist between the toes. When
you wrote paws they
were children's paws sending my spine measured against your arm eking out years in
our memory. Even tomorrow I
am causing
sand in the belly caress
of sea, drownable
name for a
harness
told by simple lines of blue and grey, as
the curve of hip and ear and
chin tells me where
I am and
am not bound
for you.
Only last night March snow a
surprise by morning, I wake flustered because I cannot tell where the heat leaves and enters
through which mouth,
which hole the yellow daffodils bathed in
white, the salt on your lip left for me a frieze
for the reclusive tongue, or this body,
she our shaking sembling one
caught in the small of young cow where any direction sleeps our motion
and
gives.
shallow from sun a
whole day's work
is us sitting here sharp &
hungry, tossed from
the speakable
ghettos North America, yellow torso molting off of
privacy defies as no
animal be subject or
suspect to fame one or both
of my hands as they catch your face from
where we picked up the train, 4:30 Thursday afternoon last week your
birthing thick over my back stars
of blood like cakes soaking the sky my
eyes sliding back ah
ah cake
of blood, little baby perineum and
hair burning we
are dirt, pretty dirt and shit, my pretty— last
week, Thursday afternoon your hair in
my mouth, liquid sun and cunt one
second, two, lost we
burn our lens with exposure between 12:30 and trickles
of the rain, a torso of rain colliding at 60 mph into
my face. That is love. Thursday
afternoon we slept like pirates little
paper hats Thursday
afternoon the sun, the moon tigers
in giant hoops, sea salt and
beach roses and hibiscus near
the shore: tender, sharp, bitter all circus rode
us, rode us, such hounds 4:30
(last) my aunt was raped by
the newspaper boy around the corner as
a girl (last) (last week,
time) last Thursday up
with the boys in the hydraulic helicopter piercing
the heavens all
their pretty bones in the sand temperature
a cool 50 degrees, and breezy epaulets,
revenge stories, she was mine,
mine, mine: Shut the fuck up! we
all want babies, little torches lighting
the sky, who told you
your blood smelled of / was the ruins of Rome last
week we were on the train fuzzy
little desert halos my
hand kept you tight inside we
ate tuna salad on wheat my
baby girl, my blue we
were flying! even
today and when they split us the
knife splitting the torso thorax bilaterally
at 60 mph off
the end of a cliff, off jewel of blood in
two, the
intestines will spill to the dirt, they
will take what they want and tack us to
the wall, and I will tack
you to the wall, my pretty hands you knew so well under
the sun, the sun we
will be animal meat like they
always knew than
the sum of our necessary acts,
geraniums potted in the noonday sun near
the office plaza are
cheery and fat. I
want my voice to be loud. In
the dream, the image was
a giant eye and
a bull superimposed like
Sunday Mass: the priest breaks the bread, gives it to his
disciples (all men) and
says, says I
want my voice to be loud! The
bull was knifed and quartered but its eyes were alive whispering you know when I will eat you Open
wide baby standing
on the corner of Wilshire and Miracle: always a corner no
one was listening the
geraniums and I were
both wearing white The
image was the museum curator
yelling Shut the fuck
up! fucking
girls and young bitches and your wedding the
night I drank too much red wine and
ate pot brownies brought
your body like a mirage not
my woman The
necessary act was marriage fighting off anemia, brain
seizures mother said
you had married the techie
sick on sex but
you wanted me to help, said where
were you when, why did you miss it sweetheart we
will be fucking in a year where was your
pretty blue dress? Time
is a more or less the sum the
sum my
girlfriend laughed hiding
the grocery bill underneath
the sheets heavy
blood cycle last month hungry
for nothing and dry
and clean In
the dream, the bull had no faces. I
was the moon black
before all eyes I
was the harshest love immediate torn redder than
the lake we grew from the
land spare and treeless the
water so red, rich I could not tell our skins apart. The
lions were warm and golden we
slept inside their furs becoming
the dream of molded paws,
female, sexual, high on eyes addicted Baby, we were
scared. When
she came around, the moon When
she came around we would go to
the corner store to buy food When
she came / around I became the dream in breasts and nothing fruit
picked by hand we ate pulp
and seeds and red all over
our jeans messy We
were hungry in the sun people stared not
realizing a woman can be hungry
co-opted by
nothing, no one
with your biting my lip June-bugs
in the cold of
snow-halos you said one
day of this, yes I
was uncomfortable, I was happy I
didn't recognize myself anymore one
mirror across the
fogged and white field I
was spark from you our
camera froze the
hesitance of snow sheer
light as energy a
black field with only my face reflected— a
source, the moon in negative one
day for itself we said because there was no sight because they said there was no
chance— One of several known species of
bird who frequent the Pacific coast, migratory lemons peeled for
afternoon, bitter mint and the rinds dropped in a pail by the door small, white teeth easily parched in cloth under pillow diagrams,
grids, diastole heart merging the endangered swallow, its delicate eggs viscerale
et immobile around
my waist and I like it red haunches pale apparition of skirt we collide as if a
rabbit we stole from the pot deep brown velvet feet un seul you take dans
ta bouche Inside the lid is
the mark the
hand raised above flesh does
not return
cold rain, children not shocked by our kiss
among the crowds holding hands I
remember how it was to touch, to
be touched. When
I fucked her it
was easy my
hand sort of slipped through the sheets like
a small fish on a mission to
get back to the eternal sea— until
my hand stopped, my body rocked forward & I woke up. It
was easy I said It
was easy we said and
then we separated and
rejoined and separated without
vigor or notice and
then after a while I couldn't call her on
the phone because
it was too much not to fuck when
we met or
rather have a good long conversation over lunch or
tea, a hot liquid, soothing which gives pleasure to the eye as
giving from tongue does &
receiving if lucky the
slight shudder in time of
skull swiveling, hair picked up by a force of wind. Like
on the train, all
the people packed in lines, shoulder to shoulder feet
perched on rests cramming
for a view out the dirty window a
harsh skyline of sand dunes & western sun &
no one can bear to look at each other. If
she were my lover sitting next to me this second Somehow
there is n
Outside the yard
Paint-bowl
I:
Exposure
Endless, endless the dust sea
II:
Milagro
In an image or a dream
Time is more
I want my voice to be loud! I said
III:
Return
February was fierce
In my other life
I don't know if I would recognize her braids.