» Poetry

Two Poems

Carolene Kurien

A Confession

I am a bad horse.

I neigh and hoof my way into the houses

of neighborhood husbands

and commission myself for rides

to know straddle and buck.

Some say my mane is the color

of the death beyond death. Some say

it’s best to avoid direct eye contact.

I ask the hydrangea why it is so hard to forgive

people who have changed. Did you know

the more acidic their soil, the bluer

they get? I am not trying to make a metaphor,

but I am saying that most of my daydreams

involve being loved by large groups

of people. I walk into a surprise party

with a banner that reads Happy Birthday,

You Are A Good Person! Someone has baked

my favorite carrot cake. Someone has bought

more mini razors for my mustache. The people I fuck

in my fantasies have no faces. I can barely make out

their bodies. The ghost of myself whimpers

under the ghost of theirselves,

and none of us can smile. The book I am reading

says it’s not my fault. How I am.

That I was just a kid, apparently. But now I am old;

my teeth will fall out soon. And my empty

mouth will no longer have someone else to blame.

Saudade

I am eating a jam sandwich the taste of rain.

I am finding it difficult to harness myself

into the concept of forgiveness. Rosmarie Waldrop

wrote Your skin was delicate, like a retracted confession.

The dent in your back I placed wishing coins upon

thin and deepening. Your empty, welling face.

Under a microscope, various teardrops have various

physiognomies. Onion tears reach outward like rhizomes,

ever-wet and blooming. Tears of ending and beginning

are Rorschach tests filled with your features: a boat-shaped

birthmark, a whisper of nose. Under the streetlight I pick

a painting and live it. I walk the cliff at Pourville.

I disassemble into yellow kiss. Above my head floats

an assembly of arms. I am uneasy with what I’ll become.