Grace Notes – Dana Guth
June 16, 2021
WE ALL HAVE THESE SPLINTERS WE HIDE IN THE GROSSEST WAYS
Don’t judge the flies
dive-bombing the phantasm
in your mouth
or the boar that suckles on wood
missing its mother
sometimes you just have to latch
where it hurts most
I am trying to stamp out
your attention
on your back
that bleating thorax
the spider-bulb it opens
like a flower
You could freeze-dry and snort
my permissions
Someone wild
looks out of me
and catches your image
on the broken shackles of light
the rain cherries’ impure
sacs—
This is my entire knowledge of science
which is to say
when you eat off the floor
I like it
+++
Ranked-Choice Voting
Fenced in the public
imagination
where priests and monks
force a masticated lack
in the cud
without generational
guidance
and the gore of stray canines
tearing open a melon
haunting me
when I bite into sour fruits
I can taste the dead heart of the universe
a stucco kitchen
where you cracked eggs on a VitaMix
and our veins pulsed
and whereas I do not have any readers
and am generally unsure of my shape
the electric shock
warm and wonderful, I feel it
because I did not believe in the human soul
at last year’s Gathering of the Juggalos
I left with many soul-bruises
and a blown-out tattoo of an ox
in those days
there were some very exciting things
happening inside me
now I am a little mouse
nibbling her tail
it’s not illegal
so when I saw our love scuttle
across the floor I squashed
it with my heel
because I wanted to be
beautiful and feared
or because
I would rather go to hell
than undress a feeling
and I have never cared
for intelligence
not with these eyebrows,
not in this economy
of wax and diuretics
in which I could never afford
a life together
so when you take
your final leave of me
I lean over the railing
feel the air whip my face
and the salival throbs
+++
SIDE AFFECTS
I use my hands to
tickle a grand piano
after vomiting
in your father’s bathroom
A real problem
you and I—unquixotic
premature— you stir
butter into coffee cups
as if that’s normal
Tibetan Book of the Dead
props up my knees
There are eyes in the body
ejaculating
death drives, terrible orchids
a preserved moose skull
I cannot give birth
to ersatz notions
of godliness pristine girl
head—Give me kratom
or Give me love! whichever
gravity stirs up
such wild carnage I said
I am shearing my dreams’
thick sheep he said you’re
bugging out he said
ba da da da
baby just shove it
in a poem
+++
with my face on the ground i can hear the earth bleating
i use my big sharp teeth
to drain the scallop
fold the napkin
at its corner
fill the hourglass
with sand
the urn I press
my thumb inside
imprinting shallow
human race
i watch the funeral
on HBO Max
a bullet tears
through a papaya
i dress my thoughts
with lime
staying horny for near-death
platitudes
like the first day you were
asked to handle
poison? i don’t know
i don’t know,
i always had a television
it is how i learned to love
+++
EVENING NEWS
Plucking porcupine quills
out of the cat
its laws of regression,
plugged like
soy in the bones?
I feel rigid with domestic
temptation
This is not a manifesto
it is my “Experience drinking water”
/
I squirt ketchup on a paper plate
and picture the body of Christ
Sorry I’m so addicted to myself
I do not write about
The throat’s secretions, the end
of the world
/
Let’s just
watch a dirty movie
with a glass of spiked orange juice
and hands dead in our laps
It’s alright
/
I saw you flexing in the mirror and your lips moved
it was really magnificent
But when you called me to bed
you looked like a cockroach
rolled on its back
/
I felt this curl in my stomach for weeks
clasping un-clasping my bra
scanning insurance cards
noticing phlegm the brittle
walk home