Putrescine
BY GWYN SISE
Can’t sleep so I put on her overcoat,
that woolen olive exoskeleton,
and step into the wrinkling nausea of the night. What am I
but the sum of all my outward parts?
When she is gone she becomes the irresistible pain
of a dead tooth in the back of my mouth.
The bloated corpses of earthworms on the sidewalk outside
will desiccate by morning.
or maybe they will rupture instead,
burst apart like blisters,
pulp themselves into nothing.
I dreamt once that she knitted me from moss,
joined the green skeins of me together with bits of chewed up bubblegum.
Later my downy limbs fell to pieces and
I became a swamp, or maybe I was
a leech on her pink skin,
sucking up her detritus.
Once she ran her fingers over the soft hairs on the back of my neck,
and I like to believe she meant it.
Ode to Hues
To just stay here marinating in the purple light of your computer screen,
that electrical hum in its plum intestines I touch and
wait for the shock that never comes and I’m
forgetting what you look like in yellow
daylight flaking away at the corners of a fading sky,
tomboy turned saint framed by wreaths of
green, sage green bedsheets frayed and
smelling like warm cotton, here you are sleeping with your head on my thigh,
all I can think is that inside the palms of your balled up fists it’s red
Red cheeks and cupid’s red bow and red intestines I would guess,
like in cartoons and science textbooks,
with the ink running in blind streaks with no direction
and the page is blue and wet, and you are cast in blue light,
your skin marbled by sweat and swathed in denim, your teeth bright blue
and later your giddy retches make
orange, and it’s orange the next day when the monarch butterflies are out
and you’re one too, migrating and migrating, overwintering,
peeling fruit at the kitchen table, drumming your fingers,
clicking your tongue, aflutter.