4
poems by
Amy Mondry
> bio
The Squash and the Squash Bug
You must be a crop.
Rows of treat.
You must be a canterbury
of squash.
Winter, summer, acorn and butternut.
You must be a bit democratic.
You could be a crookneck.
Highly warted,
harvested at physiological immaturity.
Just a boy, with a soft seed-coat,
pushed in at the skin, yellowed.
Crooning your neck,
a frost-watchman.
Flecked a bit,
mosaiced by virus.
You could be a straightneck.
Lost among squashes,
waiting to be picked,
sliced in the mid-section,
rubbed with butter,
exfoliated with cinnamon,
warmed over in an oven.
You could be a Goldbar, straight and uniform.
Maybe a Multipik,
precocious and prolific.
You sit in optimal soil,
with flowers both male and female
(so in touch)
You've got a mulch,
staving the inevitable.
You've got a patch
free of the beetle
and pickleworm.
Mr. Cucurbit,
growing upright,
flirting with honeybees,
arcing as if on a hammock,
in the cakey earth,
in my garden,
in a forty-lazy
day slumber.
Young and tender.
Cool as a cucumber.
Now what would a
squash-bug like me
do
with a fruit like
you?
More Nightmare Nightingale Girl (Or There's Nothing Sadder Than...)
Bustles, my dears, contrition.
I stream white television.
Muse:
paintbrush, moose mug,
last seconds on a nipple-pink threshold,
cleansing hands. Rows of trellis,
covers of plastic.
Utopian canvas:
The Flag of Conception.
The New York horizon.
Limbs, skin,
the penmanship of guilt.
Vanguard for decadence!
Notice that I have fallen
even in the crevice,
fed the cradle-gilled goldfish,
felt hedonic in a swarm of licorice.
Augusts,
we are spacing the cobblestone.
Feet fixing in a wax bowl.
Sharing slices of pineapple.
Ashing. Rushing the terracotta collectable
one million lovers gave you
broken. Hundreds of sunsets,
I have spoken,
planted urban lowbush inside blueberry pants,
oat floor boards cherried with red
wine stains and other remnants.
I was never good at paint or ceramics.
A dwindling. A kill-switch for
glass fragments. Blood on the Tracks.
You stood fluorescent beneath cotton pinstripes,
swearing green was gray and likewise.
Coat the levee, the fat
lattice, the canopy.
Brush even the carpeting,
a plush rose that will blush and part/
under your weight like Moses' Sea.
Like me.
I am the slam on Elm.
The rains have drenched and curled,
flaked to oblique oblivion.
Space of space. Distance of continents.
It's all good concession. All lost in the helm
of rehabilitation.
It wasn't much of a session.
It was left-handed and whatev.
It was every candid song. Period.
It was me projected:
the gloom of grace,
letters from Kansas,
an ill-advised transit.
Let me be vacant.
I echo
wrought-iron trapped in indigo.
I sift through
sure-filed cardboard, words squared and leveled.
Pictures and flyers lead me along
telephone wires and down the stairwell.
I read Orwell.
Between chapters,
I get up and slap you.
You taken down.
You left hanging.
You are a flat thesis sitting in spots
of dark where others are surer
to delve than surface.
You are hosting a basement circus.
I was helpless
to stop it. Humming Crazy
for an artist.
I think I loved
until the sun came up,
the glaze broke,
and the arc tipped us afloat,
blissless and circumspect
in the bite of the fruit.
What Have You Done To Mom?
The streetlamp woodpecker
beaked his lament to industry,
you pecked taupe letters on a
quarter-screen, I killed myself.
Killed the bulk of me,
the silent feather-fall of economy,
oiled in a portrait of me
scalped.
Now grind me.
Make me meal.
Toss me in the stealth wind,
till me underneath hyacinth,
let me weed up.
Sing me a sestina,
make me a boa,
unleash yourself.
Go on, lather up.
Dab on a lavender drop.
Divvy your kisses,
gallivant tieless,
multiply you.
I flew,
I skidded,
I crashed.
The phoenix has risen and collapsed.
You win.
She is ashen.
To the Whores
You
know
who
you
are.
