MICHELLE NOTEBOOM

 

 

 

 

Michelle Noteboom won the 2006 Heartland Poetry Prize for her first book Edging (Cracked Slab Books). Other work has appeared in Verse, Fence, Boston Review, Sentence, Columbia Poetry Review and Gargoyle, among others. She's lived mainly in Paris since 1991 where she co-curates the Ivy Writers Reading Series with Jennifer K. Dick. She works as a freelance translator in the French audiovisual industry. She also translates French poetry.

 

 

 

 

Moistly meaning psychotherapeutics in the stellar estrous age.

Alas my love you do me wrong to cast me off like a wreckfish clunkfest jester, but the essence of the lesson isn’t lost. Crouching in the embryonic kitchen with jellylike genitalia eating figs off strings and glass and silkscreens. Orion spread-eagled across the sky. An odd hand job turned sexy arty affair. You ain’t no aerosol man pssshhhhht! now you see it now you don’t, a mock mongrel ur-babbling on morphogenesis in a trenchcoat on a payphone in the metro. Number nine number nine, Chernobyl’s on the line! Anagrams of interstitial dental work sported by heavenly-bodied astrolabial nymphs. We’ll keep track of our phonetic landmarks while pillowcasing the joint and subcontracting to some weirdo with a dorsal fin. “Bull honkey,” he cried, “we’ve got more galaxies than anyone else so smarten up.” Inventorial oxydation of eucharistic shampoo approved by the suitor’s staff etherized out in the stable. The frog unbuttons its belly to the tedium of icecaps. Cuspate coeducationally for the mizzling orgy’s clubbiness and joust. Pianissimo, adagio, trim the shoetree. Just don’t let me die in Disneyland.

 

I am not the beautiful swimmer.

What utility remains in a homegrown groan milkfed and unfenced in a silent sirroco sigh betwixt two sparrows i.e. courting, collapsing in the parlor, exhausting the bubblegum supply? Separation is a bittersweet lozenge lodged in the throat, an absinthe-laced specter pressed up against the pillow, a tiny Hirohito on a motorbike. We must take care to remember our dead, their hands wringing water from a wooly rag. What a drag, a lousy break but spare us the garden variety grief. A half-melted visual haunt in a hundred shades of grey eavesdropped into my mind. Try to temper the body’s language as you google your emotion, your symptom, your self. If I sleep in your bed, will I dream your 58 dreams? New and improved restrictions governing the angles of an origami brain. Last night the shortened train that tunneled its way so adeptly through the mountain snow, the lone skater gliding into icy thunder squall. The underwater us goes haywire like the tiles, fairy-like fish hung translucent on a hook. Doing darkened things in a darkened poppy room (the screen blinks ‘discount erection madness’). Defrosting the fridge. The marble of the meat and the sinew in the pillar. After lights out it’s lights back on again. Another image seeps into the floor, pulsing and hatching like the scary blue of an umbilical cord.

 

I am so not the beautiful swimmer.

Beat burn and attack the ways of the heart using aesthetically challenged methods and a prescribed use of five. Raise a glass to thrombosis, disproportionate distress, the crystal splintered innards in a hot vacation car. A thirst for upset somehow jinxes it into being (a body inscribed in some Central Asian steppe). I wasn’t me in the night in your dream in your arms, an ink blotch inching coldly ’cross the sheet. (The significant smother.) Yet no single thought for the vacated crab we dismembered back on the flourescent blood-soaked beach. You mustn’t pop just anyone’s blackheads. Running the gamut of gimic as the adjectives mince forth dodging milk teeth. My right eye seeing blue. Ding dong the witch carbon-dated like that scar that’s all that’s left of you and me against the wall. There’s no albatross ’round this or any neck. Even Frank Sinatra wouldn’t sing that sappy song. Chalk a newfound capacity for hysterics up to chastity and nosebleeds. (A human huddled pulses in the dust). Now my eye veers green as we hit the final inning in an endgame. Teal tattooed on the brow. Toss and score. I just can’t carry these legs of bird meat anymore so go ahead and take that break. I’m having trouble with the marginalia (yours). Next time vote for silicone. Another six months spent slipping through the cracks, barely missing the train. I pack my tears and burst into boxes, wrestle over the content conception. “Eats – bowl – sheet!” Precisely. Now it’s change your nylons, change your life. Strollers of the world, unite! Epistolary deception or delight. Fingering dogtags and yanking the bandage off. Anesthetize. Gyrostabilize. There’s nothing wrong with my lap.

 

© Michelle Noteboom 2006.

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