Love of the Angler
a tanka
What devastation—
the in-malleable nature
of my body in
your eye. Pricked by the steel hook,
I bleed wet, limp in your hands.
mangeon - envie
there is something sweet about fish bones tucking
themselves between the tooth and gum, scavenging for a
morsel — harboring a bit of the skeleton for yourself,
refusing to let the carcass rest between slick globs of
saliva— the bones’ only desire is to be closer to you—to
dwell in your whispers knowing that their war with
stomach acid is futile and whispers come from the neck
Waterlogged
and with a bullhead spilling out from my eye
after it found a suitable burrow in my tear ducts
i pick myself up by the notches in my hips
to stand a little taller
feel the kind of heavy that could make me my own drowning stone
i have already tried to soak myself away
as if the bath doesn’t make a cast of me
remembers the hands that have tried to rip me from my seams
carries my scrubbed skin back home
i resign to counting eczema scars
adipose pools
the unyielding crescent shaped flesh
and the feeling of my ribs bowing
what if i were to be seen
and expected to brandish the undulating stomach
sink into the heaved name
caravaggio could take the bullhead
but what would that leave me
with lips humming in the ear drum
a wild thing overturned
because the belly protruded
i am full
in fact i am quite charismatic at times
upchucking quips from the river bed
as everyone else stands on the shingle
in fact i thought i’d be beautiful once
but the young dancers foot flattened overtime
eager to meet the earth
tallow 277 (whiskey and vodka)
—i remember what it was like to be comfortable and ugly, i want to go back to that so i bathe in the dark. i remember the music that makes my body feel like a moon phase and what it means to pull my face in the mirror. when i was primarily composed of useful fats. i remember the taste of salmon and lime. i don’t remember much of when i was pretty—tethys eclipsed by the cloud tide, broken cello strings, thighs rubbed raw. i remember all of these and not being pretty.
twelve calls to me while i scorch my toes on bath water. i wish it were the drink. got lost in melville’s musings of the deep. i wish it was the drink. i am overdue for a bender. for my eye to look back at me from the bottom of a rocks glass. for a vacation from jóhann’s tinnitus. i have nothing left to write besides lungs and teeth and skin and yes i have said this before. it nags with the twelve. floors and faces and drinks. it nags with the twelve. shores and bogs and mouths. they nag with the twelve.
(sip)
i think he pulled the music from my bones. jóhann. it was amber and marrow scented. sweet minerals. slathered across a 45 for the score. i wish i could compose such in syllables. i feel around my mouth to tune it. i hum into the pillow, feed the ears, hold the note under my tongue. i miss cranberry tongues and tequila cheeks, sleeping belly up in the pool, and convening with the cicadas. bayou toes and mosquito ears. farmer tans and boudin. i miss the way my face fractured in the waves.
(sip)
i began again and began again and began again and turned myself over without moving i washed and drank and sat very still i watched the shadows of the day grow across my face and there were barbs in my spine soil in my throat banshees in my teeth it’s all skin and spines and teeth it’s all cats and cows in the dark curling themselves that’s what they call syncopation that’s what they call scoliosis i imagined a shiny new body that wouldn’t crumple i tried to hold this body closer i tried to unzip it and put it in a dust bag i thought i could get away in the books but i think i’m meant to throat sing with the oarfish they whistle to me in the dead of night as if to taunt me because no matter how flat i lay in the bottom of the bath i will never become one of them.
(sip)
perhaps i could be pretty again—
When We Were Fish
How did the early spine in fish help it move through water?
One would drown if not for the serpentine ways of the spine,
left aghast in the waves calling for mothers
long gone. Muscles forged
while the spine holds you together
from the inside, coaxing the current.
Feel the waves careen away from the hips,
carrying dead skin to a more somber tide.
How did the change to having front and back fins affect how we look today?
We were jawless embryonic things,
bound to acrid aftertastes and
graspless. Without fins,
our limbs wouldn’t know wading from
a fond embrace. And
the infantile crawl would be nothing more
than threshing in the mud.
Why was a jaw with teeth an advantage?
The gaping maw, toothless, is unable to wean itself
or utter merciful wishes for prey. Additionally
even devouring flora is blasphemous without
the motion of the mandible, brutish defiance
against the earth we wrought.
Explain the theoretical origins of our lungs.
The windpipe, uncrushed, branches off
because to swallow, gasp, speak, shriek, breathe
is far too much burden for one vestibule and
by growing halls we made echoes within ourselves.
And as for our ears?
We fell berserk straying so far from the waves
and our own bodies were too loud.
Meanwhile our unweaned brethren were stunned deaf
from the constant lapping swell.
Jordan Blanchard is a poet hailing from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work is an homage to the mess of the bayou. She can be found where there is water, her work can be found in Autograph Gallery, BRUISER Mag, Crashtest, the Kenyon College Anthology, Wired the Zine, UMBRA and the online companion, UMBRAT. Her self-published collection, river muck, baby is out now.
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