Nat Raum

—after Jennifer’s Body (2009, dir. Karyn Kusama)

​

come on, now, who among us hasn’t 

wanted to maim a boy before? tell me honestly 

now that nothing in you aches for flesh like this, 

for skin on skin and the soundtrack of brackish

swells writhing like a carpet of black snakes

in moonlight. i bring you mists

and gales that halt ferries day and night,

lure you to tyvek cliffside houses with promise 

of sugar and liquor, personal peaches and plums 

nearly mealy. i bring you surge of eyewall

after passing calms move northeast over

the two of us, tidal waves of weeping veins

on cold concrete and pressure-treated plywood. 

 

i’ll eat you in front of you.

   dratchells and divorcés alike lock

lips with virginia slims                  drawing baths for kerosene tobacco

dirty gin martini makeouts                       (the mezzanine windows are

cracked on the street side)                         fireside madeira in deluxe suite

sitting rooms awash in umbers and ochres                   milk snakes shedding

buttoned denim shorts two sizes too big

 

to blue lace slips                neutron stars flicker like pilot lights

in the dark    (after all this time well wishes never cease to

sting like lemonade in fever blisters)                i am brittle like gazelle  

limbs sculpted from wicker                    points on a map which vanish

by the hundreds daily                  woozy and shivering flesh comes

home to hearth       personal smokestacks languishing upward 

into splintering eaves