Anatomy of a Dress

Here is my heart: one red lozenge
Sitting pretty on a heap of slow
Putrefaction, its breathing hole at my ear. It is my own heart and
I love it.

Let’s talk about weather—only for a moment,
I know how it peeves you,
Let’s go ahead and get blinded
To sorrow under a bright filament.
I can remind you about yesterday’s noon lit
Pond and the wrung woman across
It who told her boyfriend “I don’t get drunk anymore,”
you making understanding noises, the same slow-petalled burn, “just a plague of headaches.”
Dragonflies were her strongest fetish (as they lit, red and blue,
Over its surface). I won’t talk about mirrors. They protected her. And then:
They are shaped like the catheters the technicians slipped
Into her hand the morning she was rushed to the hospital.
Jaundice. They had the same strong wings. She says

Dear so-and-so, I’m sorry and
Also I haven’t a thing to apologize for, you sycophant,
Did you know, you can make a red mettle from
A jar of bees? Arthritis, even human things.
To say: I was harvested, my
Jagged joints poisoned clean.

I’ll let you raze the first inconsistencies but for god’s sake
let’s talk honestly, let’s make an agenda of an agenda dismantled
And stop the shorthand deference to kindness.
We don’t believe in kindness,
Moreover there is none, no magnets, no garnets in the sand, no wax hands in the shape of a heart—no limp and milquetoast tendrils to lead
Us in circles through this poem.

You are a material object, an insect, a machine,
or an animal, your singular obsession to

Follow the sound of the sound down into your own red heart.
You can listen to its murderous bleats, like any other. The stories
You tell yourself to stay alive.