La Pelona as Birdwoman


Tonight
I dared to crawl
beneath the sheets

to be nailed down
around me,
waiting for my lover, she

who enters
without knocking, she
who will unstitch

my every seam
along my thigh,
my side, my armpit.

She who carves
a heart out of the heart
and drops it

down her throat.
Sweet surrender this
slow death in sleep

as I dream
the love-making
is autopsy. How else

will I be hers
completely? Be her
treasure box I said:

a trove of pearls
and stones, the ding
of coins cascading

through her fingers.
The bird over her shoulder
not a parrot, but an owl

to be my mirror
when I close my eyes
and shape a moon-white

bowl out of my face
where she can wash
the hooks of her caress.

Still with water, I’m
one more thing to penetrate.
I’m one more spill

of secrets on the floor.
A puddle glowing green—
she doesn’t have to be a sleuth

to see I’ve taken
all the anti-freeze.
A puddle thick with red—

she’ll kneel
next to my wounds
and pray for me,

a string of pigeon skulls
her rosary.
By dawn our bone pièta

breaks out of its shadow,
unleashes its cicada cry.
My daughters drag

their bodies, bruised as bats,
out to the light
and burst in flames

like marigolds.
The crows will leap
down from the trees

to pick them clean.
And my beloved bride,
beloved wife, will laugh

until it hurts her teeth.
It’s the feather
of her tongue—

eleventh finger—
I recall
and not the catheter

while the priest recites
his holy dribble
and the churchyard

worker takes a leak.
My sons hold up
their chins with pride

that they have done
their part to hide
my suicide:

they’ve clipped
my fingertips
to lose the track

back to my prints.
But my beloved knows:
she crouches

on the highest branch 
and drops an egg
that cracks my coffin.

Concussion light
squirms through
and I’m in heaven once again—

those times
we screwed like hen
and rooster: I

the squawking chicken
blacking out, and she
the hammering cock.

First appeared in The Rome Review (Issue 1, Summer 2009)