You’ve been Shylocked,
\nI said,
\nas I dipped the tip of my nose
\ninto pursed lips.
\nThis is how Jews kiss.
\nYou pinched a pound of stomach flesh-
\nthough I owed you the rest of it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The putto mooning the bridegroom
\nspews the same youth
\nthat dripped from your head when we met.
\nThose pigments are permanent.
\nThe sky has been blue since the fifteenth century.
\nWe braved the air simultaneously,
\nwatercolours and slaked lime.
\nI am dyed
\nblush pink with specks of cherry red.
\nAndrea’s heaven is missing your mustache.
\nForeshortened figures scoff at rubberneckers.
\nWide knees and plum feathers
\ntrick ill-equipped eyes.
\nYour elbows are softer than mine.
\nYour earlobes are three-dimensional.
\nLeave it to a poet to counter her own metaphor.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The lake is better than I am
\nat being still
\nat night.
\nYou asked if I knew about the stars.
\nI know about sacred promises
\nand letters squeezed into godless
\nnames.
\nH pegs in free-form holes.
\nI am sorry,
\nbut I\u2019ve gotten into the habit
\nof close reading our past
\nand if you could understand it
\nthe significance of our words
\nwould hijack your mind.
\nA Russian maverick
\nwarned against mixing in
\nflour before sifting-
\nor was that in a recipe for sharlotka?
\nSomehow
\nI have let him down.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s syncopate the space
\nbetween my head and your chest.
\nCurved cartilage makes for a pliable placeholder.
\nSay something nebulous,
\na mispronounced \u201casparagus\u201d,
\ninto our flesh apostrophe.
\nI don\u2019t contract
\nregularly.
\nI eat carets for breakfast.
\nI have enough in my breadbox
\nto feed a flotilla of script.
\nI didn\u2019t want touch so much
\nuntil the carpet in your basement
\nleft honeycomb imprints
\nin susceptible skin.
\nManley was right
\nabout dappled things.
\nUnder the string switches hanging
\nfrom bare lightbulbs,
\na wood beam ceiling and a zodiac
\nduvet (the maiden at my knee,
\nlion at your shoulder),
\nI lost the phrases I was saving for later.
\nI only loved you more
\nwhen you said,
\n\u201cI want to kiss each one of your eyelashes.
\nThat isn\u2019t poetry.
\nI want to do it\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Do We Not Laugh? You’ve been Shylocked, I said, as I dipped the tip of my nose into pursed lips. This is how Jews kiss. You pinched a pound of stomach flesh- though I owed you the rest of it. Fresco The putto mooning the bridegroom spews the same […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1655,"parent":229,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-995","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1625,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/995\/revisions\/1625"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}