Volume 16 ~ Spring 2004 ~ ISSN 1543-6063

MARK BIBBINS

REDSHIFT

You made me want blood then
handed me the blade, now

I have only dragging
steel over everything or fitting

my knees in my mouth, where
I go when I want something

pure or approximately so.
A long blank space will do

or a remnant of blood.
The light arrives

in honeycombs and the wind
through funnels follows

and we are not here
speaking, just crammed.

This can't equal the music
I heard—the interface only

allows a wind of blades
glitched out and aimed

at everything skin. I can't
get near a bloody mary, its

lewdness, its red forecast of vomit,
though there's solace in the ad man's

commitment to the many
pills he shills. I feel I haven't

really lost the blood
from my stomach so long

as I can see it on the deck.
The whales are below, about

to unleash a net of bubbles
that will drive tons

of panicky mackerel to the surface
and to their deaths.

Hunger made us, they'd say,
that's all, as it does you.

The lewdness of the great inflated
bellows of their mouths

is mitigated by the fish, an explosion
of blades cutting the foam

with their dying, the gulls
diving into the blades.

The lewdness
of the pen in my backpack

impaling the banana I got
on the flight from Denver,

the lewdness.
The body is a foe.

Poem © Mark Bibbins 2004. All rights reserved.

Mark Bibbins teaches writing workshops at The New School, where he co-founded LIT magazine, and at Purchase College. His first collection of poems, Sky Lounge, was published by Graywolf Press in 2003. He lives in New York City.

Duncan Hannah
www.artnet.com

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