Safety Glasses Required Beyond This Point
Sex Starved Fruit Flies Have Shorter Lives
Playing House (A Warning)
Safety Glasses Required Beyond This Point
Place where animals go after
they’re peeled from pavement.
Place that catalogs bodies like a junkyard:
intact hips in one heap, jaws in the next.
Place that draws skins around the unfamiliar
shoulders. Place where only the worst are
beyond salvaging, most not broken enough
to be unrecognizable. We want to believe
no one forgets vows, but what remains
behind glass eyes? Fur swirls in the air.
A saw spits bone. Shrapnel, like a splinter,
may work its way to the heart and kill. And so
we wear plastic goggles and leather aprons
in the bedroom, love as though rummaging
through a wreck – sternum, femur, rib,
rib – reclaim parts that matter. Now
we are the taxidermist bent
over what’s left, the work
-bench as shrine, the place
where the resurrected
crouch face to face, bare
fangs and wait.
Sex Starved Fruit Flies Have Shorter Lives
She is a knife fight, and he invites her to a formal dinner.
He’s the shark cage she wants in, and her teeth make it possible.
He approaches on the street as a stranger, slips a nickel
behind her ear and retrieves it like magic. One old parlor
trick. One stiff grin. And yet in no time she lies sequined,
split in half, bends that way for the audience while an adult film
plays on the big screen at the front of the room. She is milk
from saucer, is feather. And frosting. He peels an orange
during, holds his breath until. They play Dark Ally, Apocalypse.
They construction site and heavy equipment. He country songs
the night away, his chorus breathy and long. They wrong
way a one-way, collide with and tangle like. Heap of metal, this
twisted pair. Like dragonflies they couple midair, almost
enough between them and the ground to avoid the undertow.
It may not go as planned.
But when failure, when
collapse, go ahead:
curl up in the empty
tea cup and sleep. If you wake,
still restless, tip your tiny ship
into the sea and turn your fate over.
Since God may be mostly absent,
set sail with whatever
holy trinity you can manage.
Today, try fox, octopus
and curiosity, a Mars rover.
It is no longer possible
to rely on this world, every night
a blur of chasing and being
chased. You travel entire continents
looking for love and return
to sniff out what’s right
in the backyard. A kind of comfort
being a body on a mattress,
wrapped so tight by eight limbs.
To couple is to create a large knot
in the belly of a hotel bed. Every time
you slay loneliness you’re left
sweaty, breathless. In the scene
artists paint depicting what you believe
is triumph, tentacles rise
from below, grip the masts
and submerge the vessel.
The sea creature’s den is as dark
as the depths of space
and as hard to penetrate.
You cannot breathe.
Only the fox is free to roam
the field. Wind passes over
corn stalks somewhere,
and a little girl unpacks
china for her next set of guests.
Carolee Bennett lives in Upstate New York, where – after a local, annual poetry competition – she has fun saying she has been the “almost” poet laureate of Smitty’s Tavern. She has an MFA in poetry and works full-time as a writer in social media marketing. She manages the Twitter account for the Tupelo 30/30 writing project and recently joined the reviews team at The American Poetry Journal. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in River Teeth, Crab Creek Review, Contrary, Naugatuck River Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Tar River Poetry, Stone Canoe and The American Poetry Journal.
