MISTRESS FORMIKA

In temple city, in this tight lighthouse of rare women,

my pale goggles stinging in the lemon juice
of all my watching, where even your synthetic

hairs are generous, yielding to a stiff ritual, perfect with your
gynecoid east village supersmirk. That smarts!
This perfomance of thighs blessed with an excruciating

unnatural talent for the part. For the parting.
And the pupils, we, and the lashes, all yours, observe
the rules of tragedy-in-sumptuous-fabrics, loving but strict,

in fact bullying, my god the backwatching and the switchblade!
And all imaginary: the spell a queen casts on her bee, a lover will
let herself be made up in orange for the beloved, but yours

is a sweeter excercise, twistier. Thank you, for shaking, for
who hasn't forgotten how to use her diva-noodle?
Can this be too much pleasure in one so smart, debauched

and thin? So far beyond wondering we have fallen
into quarreling, braided evening feelers in hand,
with this dark stallion blindness, too close to the fence to jump

it clean. You, both gate and barrier to the hearth and breast
of eve and adam's apple orchard. And I stumble over
strange broken pieces strewn everywhere, what's the damage?

Is it you sleeping in the grass, dear with a cheeky bliss,
pale and mournful? The delicious no-secret plain and defused,
genitalia quiet and ripe, the gorgon of your hair loved off

and lying guilty where you tossed it,
by the broken fence, firewood for a home too well built
for such arsonists of the flesh to resist.


--Brenda Shaugnessy