Kat Dixon: Scales, Upper Peninsula, Ten
Scales
This is how we sleep in black and white.
Lean very close because I’m telling you something,
something about fire or
wood,
twelve puffs on the back of the throat
three times a day.
Every shape of my mouth is something stolen.
: Stolen when I had my right ear electrocuted
to keep my uterus cupped in flour.
The body is a tired subject, exhausted in Bulgarian, in the length
of the apostrophe that mirrors your spattered eyelid,
touching
riverbed and clavicle in one unscheduled tangerine good
morning, or,
in
translation, mine.
Upper Peninsula
It is understood now that Michigan
is known only by her handwriting
and
each half dimpled planet
is a woman with a man’s name
In this
peculiar climate
your bones rattle as
if they’ve memorized every word
in the Russian language in record time It cannot be unsaid
that while you sleep I hide my possessions in your
joints
and in the hollows of your ears
one pearl bracelet I found in the ocean and several
slips of paper with
important dates all done out of spite
after you noticed that
you could slide
a fish between each
of our words
without splitting eggs in any
afterthought
or leaving the mailbox unhinged
For completely unrelated reasons Michigan is sinking
Ten
She steadies herself against the
door, a cigarette from the morning walk sparkling in the
folds of her esophagus. I ask if her knit sweater intends to be that
self-contained, and she
answers that none of the furniture
matches. I blame the painters for the
charcoal smeared
into the carpet while Milta
comments on the status of tequila from the foyer below. You
should have it all refinished,
she says, settle on a motif. The
repetition is nauseating – the
armoire has been established as a
focal disaster, someone’s abandoned moon, Denver’s
finest collection of pinholes
shipped east for a rustic disagreement of culture. I step into the
footprints left in charcoal on
the carpet. I clearly could not have
done this, I say. She inspects
the desk chair, transplanted from
a sewing machine, like someone sworn to secrecy and waits to be
disowned. Lines and lines of fabric amount in the
drawers of the armoire, all dresses never made.
Kat Dixon is poetry editor of Divine Dirt Quarterly and author of Kississippi (an e-chap from Gold Wake Press).
Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in blossombones, Indefinite Space, Otoliths, Clockwise Cat,
and elsewhere. She may occasionally be found blinking at katdixon.blogspot.com.
