The City of Babylon and How it Burns
Blight on the neighborhood. I’ve kerosened the manor.
All of my good will has gone. The whole pack of bucking horses,
my stallions wetted, mares in heat.
Come! The machine men!
Steamroll to jelly,
into paste, into glue.
Gimme! Unburden unto me your confessionals, I’ll lick
the ass of each pew and there I’ll taste hell, a certainty.
Finally.
Thoughts and ideations, shame after shame after shame. My tongue filthy
riddled with nails.
The earth, blemishless. The end of crime
topples the prison industrial complex. At last!
The extinction of cages made for men.
No! The welders are out of work, their babies
jaundiced.
Cruelty and charity in waltz, a little lilting rhyme, worth a dollar or so tossed.
In flight, it returns to hands unwashed,
garbage
again.
I, in and inside another’s
skin now. Pacification a profession.
Alas, it is a bayonet.
Alas, it is churned earth.
Server no more, my skin is wet and warm.
Useless, lucky me!
God, I tell you, untethered from Use, like smoke, I levitate.
A panorama of my menace, everything a girl could want.
Try Anything once, is a beautiful sentiment. What is Anything’s flavor,
Does it taste of life, would it taste of cum?
Another flag, nation, more familiar
than one would expect, conceals the broken,
martyrs the departed.
A footstool, a guy, a lady, a ladder, the difference can be
complicated.
Citizen, Me! I am unsure
of what I want, so I want
everything.
I’ll never say no to a tumble, to a brawl.
But wanting, endless angry wanting, writhing, salivating,
The theater of war, how vibrant are it’s blossoms
the boys will drum with
Matchsticks. The conquered will bleed in their meadows.
I’ll twirl in their silks, I’ll sample their wines.
I want to bite something that screams so
I know that I’ve won.
I’m the last tom, dripping dick,
sunning on an awning,
watching lesser cats dodge cars.
Fatherless father to
a drumming
of kittens, hissing, hunting.
They’ll come soon to taste the honey of desire that comes
like locusts and leaves like
sand.
What a luxury to be useless in a season of wanting.
Filling my days with charity.
“Let’s go to a hole and spit on some hungry kids”
Friendo, bathing in my moat.
Summer smells of Anything.
Sheep’s blood is like brandy to the anemic.
A nostrum, a crusade.
Selling price to a broken man,
to a broke mother.
To a molly in heat, begging sex, please! otherwise someone to conquer,
upon whom, she builds a fortress, impenetrable.
A love that is sexless,
and yet there it is,
taking its wool tongue
to the womb’s walls.
The Rapture Infinite Dance-A-Thon
I am going out to grab an orange soda from Night Star and then I will kill everyone on earth that looks like me. I am going out to scrub the pink from my lips with duckweed from the banks of the Mississippi and then I will kill everyone that looks like me. I will kill everyone on earth that looks like me and then I will lay their bodies brownish, as mortar in my cloudbound tower. I am going to build a tower and it’ll be a great tower, up to God’s balls, it’ll smell like orange peels and piss and cedar and tobacco. I am going to go crazy for a month, I will contract bouts of selective deafness, and it’ll be like an extended vacation. I am going to stack my vacation days and then I am going to get pregnant. I am going to howl and spit with each contraction, I will be yellow-eyed lupine grinning on my back in the sweaty cot, a bug in stirrups. I am having a daughter with moony pieta eyes just like me. I am having a daughter with an idiot tongue like me. I am going to brush her hair with almond oil and press gauze, tacks, and blue notes into the soles of her shoes. I am going to show her Pony and Ege and Indian Summer, and then I will maul her with silences. I am going to hold her head fast, and from the parapets point her eyes to the blueing and the garishness and say, “there is no one on earth for us but us.”
— Gia is a 23 year old living in Philly, she’s been published before in The Laurel Review and Expat Press, she’s pretty nice and makes a good bread.