Lo Kwa Mei-en is the author of Yearling, forthcoming from Alice James Books. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, West Branch, and other journals. She lives and works in Ohio.---------
How to Make Love to the Camera Obscura
The house aches. The house is holding on with a thing like restraint.
How can you come any closer with a mouth like that, like a red room
turned upside down? The house hurts to see you so. Even flown up
at the ceiling, the sheet stays taut on the bed and the bed is comforted
by all the right angles. Half-light, then no light at all, how could you
think I would not watch? Flipped, the loveseat fucks off at gravity like
a sail made of stone. An animal with a sword for a face, I saw you all
slicked back and true in my heart’s black eye. It was a door that never
shut and so was I, were you. You were what a wing cut out of the air
when beating up in a shut box made out of brick and the house breaks
when you come around. Enough to let in a look, love it large, blow
and throw it up against the living room wall. The house is a rolling
eye, planetary wide in the wide night, and we will never blink again,
less a body be a gospel with an end, centerfold at the speed of light,
no. Keep the glossed finish, and I’ll keep my rewound hurt reeling.
This was when all my portraits were breath held, shots of a pitching
dark room, and one thing crossing it. And this, how no room wild
as a sparrow lost and darting could help but zero to the pinhole, eye
-ful of modest light, lifted, or else a slice of what waits on the other
side. Creature in vertigo, forever wrong-side up, I could not help my
self but begin. The house is a small death, feathered. Something like
restraint with a shudder. Little to see of the battle of our bodies but
that shoulder, drawn like an angry arrow, bared in the strange dark.
The house, shot through its heart. The room fell up into my arms.
How to Make Love to the Museum
Now that the light has been for so long waning—& now, unlit,
I’m eerie. As unlucky a day as any to close for the curious &
nervous pealing open of glass boxes—as many as can bear to
be found, be broken. A hand reaches down inside a gold some
-thing ancient to touch it. As for the peeling of time, I’ll rack
up the taboo crease of its sleeves, uncuff its grief and throw it
down at the foot of the curving stair, throw it like the heart’s
garbage, since we could never need a thing that salvages need
by keeping us afar with the polished sheet of a glance, oh my
patron, exploring fiend, negative star of blacked out after loss
-light. Come erase me to save me. Under an atrium, in the art
-lover’s cave, backed into a closet of bones that shed a bright
chemical feather over marrow to hide or a hide of prehistoric
leather. The heart of me a limb to hold down now, where for
once, the total of what you don’t know won’t hurt me. Once
too shy to say it, but I know what you like: to extinguish one
body & turn the light on, train it like a station, a crossroad eye,
a proper name for what I do to you between echoes of extinct
whatever, one fossilized moan shuttering up the spine of you.
Forget the true cost of admission, lover—I’ve got you covered
until the dawn of time, loyal like a dangered wing embracing
a donor wing with your name on it. Everything inside me died
once for your pleasure & by love I would slay it again, by wild
lamplight, floored before you, extinct in a look that could kill—
Romance in Which the Lion Degrades
I lie down in the armory of dead grasses and play rough
All my life I trained to ignore a lion’s sound just enough
to see the dark by I shoot true and shoot myself crying
relief and belief in the barracks Wreck is rest I’m lying
down for days in the mouth of a king I must diminish
the lion I’ll cut off its tail Can’t I love what I demolish
Fair’s fair We rub shot earth in the shot ink of his good
eye A solar flare in a cage can’t touch a neighborhood
So get cagey sans comfort Little king Littler crown
slant over an eye like honey caught fire coming down
Like a sun caged Like new earth claimed You can’t deny
Fair’s fair Fight fire with firepower that asks no reply
How does one see the lion best In the no window low
light room of my heart lies a revolver It slow grows
tawny on the floor Does my finger on a trigger get you
off with the safety off Every shadow is coming true
and cocks a head back My weapon fed off scrap, it’s true
But what sleeps in my chamber can see better than you
King of something King of no one King of nowhere
How does one let the lion down kind Hello there
kitten Heard you could make love like we make war
Kingdoms shudder at the glass Outlast that, rock star
What wrote you a legend rides you coward and clown
Lay down in the trench of silent grasses Lay down
By fall I followed I lay right down I took up arms
in arms of men All my life I trained by the charms
like a ghost of the lion How did you kill the lion
Every day With haunt Did you see the stilled lion
lit by light of man In an all wall wild heart you do
what you do How does one right the lion Do you
My lion If I did give you my fortune the flesh gift
Would cost all This song so black my love will rift
red paths out the armory that rocks me Will infect
the city that kinged you Will king you Will defect
Will put down my arms of men Love will lie down
in the mouth of a king cut down Will not lie down