The Ex

Nyla Matuk

Every flavour expired, even staid old butter pecan,
and we snuck away dirty: chocolate mint, old fashioned,
green cherry soda, red nuts hot from a bag.

What do I care if those slides are high. Fried food slides, doesn’t it?
We screamed the unison song, smoked the exotic bong, looked
corn-burning, experiment-guessing louts in the eye, saw freedom for the
morris-dancer and the organ grinder with the old-world mirrors.

Voodoo statuette so mean
jostled with fur-cloth bear             in aquamarine.

Fun fear fat.
Hot fun, hot fat.

Fame.
Pie.

You can get those really big lemonades.
How about her apples, I asked, her cheeks & waffles, her chicken & biscuits
her hot hot tubs. How about sadistic barbiturates bastard at the money tank:
captured mermaid, one pound; her husband, two.
We knew the atmosphere and years were too late for that outfit.

Go there on Percodan. Try the snake parade sausage wheel.

Swing bum suckers, we parted with our money or just rolled it up
and pushed it into some unfortunate animal’s paw.
And we’ll go topless next year.

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Stopover in Copenhagen

When you were due to make your arrival, the docks of red neon were dancehalls and sleazy hotels. I wanted to show you the waiting mermaid, the magic carpet, the oneiric buzz. Tivoli’s lights were not twinkling, the elephant was sleeping for the season. February’s pelt would be soft on our cheeks in this town of squares. While I waited we floated above dark streets like Pan and his Wendy, the homes tall like coffins causing us dreams of Edinburgh, witches bursting in midsummer like succulents in the wintergarden. We lived with people through so many windows on canals, and long tables of plunders and ancestors, I can’t say. The sun was only as bright as an egg yolk, the sea rolled and thickened the air like decoration. A statue of the philosopher, who had once jilted his fiancée, like you looked at her from the years of his life thinking either, or.

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Now for Vesalius

Three hundred years before the seat of the disease
found in the wounds of the French Revolution
arriving by cartload at Paris hospitals,
Vesalius uncovers all our shame.

He looks defiant in a portrait of 1534
and points to the liver, the heart, the lungs,
exposing them after a kill and sometimes in an open field,
where mere stench was the lesser surprise.
Like the smart set at the opera,
a crowd of young doctors looks on
chomping to go for afters,
cigars, talk of women and brandies and maps of the world.

He isn’t quite mocking God
but he is content, in his ruff and doublet.
His cut is lethal to the poor cadavers,
the organs the same, the prick getting the same bleed.

In this picture, he thinks the liver is connected to the heart
and an extra, fictional organ, now a little clown’s nose
in our better catalogue of parts.

Now we laugh about it, our earnest forebear
with his knife and no smile.

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