Thursday Nov 21

On Hiatus

Lucy Anderton - Poetry

Lucy Anderton lives in a 500-year-old brothel at the level of the tree tops. Her poems have appeared in, among others,  Beloit Poetry Journal, FENCE, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, and Verse Daily. If you would like to read more of her work, her latest chapbook, the flung you, can be found at New Michigan Press. 
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What of Your Red Fingers
 
1.
 
When you checked out
That frozen day and burned
Your furniture in the lot
Behind your house,
I started to see
Rose ribbons edging
Up doorposts, scarlet
Blazing from the mouths of cars,
Our sparkling world
Slapped in blood and burn,
Your gray eyes—
Unkind, really: blades.
 
 
2.
 
Punching a star
is no more
dangerous then pressing
fingers into the heart
of a young enough
girl. Your heart
is a brilliant fist
of fire, shimmering
in a cage of breath—
copper hot.
 
 
3.
 
Did it start with the blood
Every month in the hive—or
Was that their ghost? We did
Brush the wishbone between crook
Of eye—feathered back of knee— sweat,
I’ve seen it: The beads on your wrist. I missed—
I missed the bees in your cheek.
 
 
4.
 
What is it like to melt.
 
 
5.
 
This is the part
that no one will understand:
But did I? Yes, I entered
your circle of hair, the knots
at the bed posts—we slept in
the wood store, threw shoes
and diaphanous scarves in
Spain: I have questions!
It must have been hard to fit your body into the mouth of every day:
Into that red bulb of morning with its blooming lips of sun.
Your legs would run. Run!
Through miles in a darkness I would not
walk through.
 
 
6.
 
There is a splendid rage
to a forest fire.
Objective, indifferent
to the gentle hips
of rabbits. Bone
crisps dazzle
up in the royal
arms of smoke
plumes. The hysterical
Opera of atoms
chanting everything
is equal when it is charred.
Your arms spread
out—the shot
of wind— your
cindered stare
lands black—this
is the lonely
of silt finger
tips—now where,
where is the lifting?
 
 
 
The sinister juice
 
 
has bitten thoughtfully
into the bones. Moss—
that, too, blushes
up the bouquet
of roots. The hem
of your modest dress
unnerves me. It is the diamond
demon in me—you are
no longer sweet and straight
in some plastic
seat but now on
your knees, a fist
of hair shaking
from the top
of your head—how
still you are untouched
in that seat. These ill
moments—this slim
frozen breath. A knife
in the countryside.
A rip in the silk.
The spit has not run
off my face, nor
the blood closed
its gate, nor has my pretty
fate been unmangled.
So much of a rubber
crushed ball was I.
So easy to cut,
to separate.