Witch Wife
Witch Wife
Poems
Kiki Petrosino
Sarabande Books
Louisville, KY | Brooklyn, NY
Copyright © 2017 Kiki Petrosino
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Petrosino, Kiki, 1979- author.
Title: Witch wife : poems / by Kiki Petrosino.
Description: First edition. | Louisville, KY : Sarabande Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017002605 (print) | LCCN 2017002874 (ebook) | ISBN 9781946448033 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781946448040 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3616.E868 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PS3616.E868 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017002605
Interior and exterior design by Kristen Radtke.
Manufactured in Canada.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
One
Self-Portrait
Young
New South
This Is How We Feed the Animals
Contagion
Maria
Elegy
Whole 30
Thigh Gap
First Girdle
Voice Lesson
Little Gals
Sermon
Two
Pastoral
Nocturne
Twenty-One
Study Abroad
Europe
Why Don’t You Wear a Black Crepe Glove Embroidered in Gold, Like the Hand That Bore a Falcon?
Break-Up-A-Thalamion
Let Me Tell You People Something
Political Poem
Afterlife
Estival
Doubloon Oath
Three
I Married a Horseman
Ghosts
Witch Wife
Lament
Vigil
Prophecy
Confession
The Child Was in the Woods
Prospera
Four
Nursery
Gräpple
Post-Apocalyptical
Ought
N/Ought
Jantar Mantar
The Temple at Govind Dev Ji
Scarlet
Letter to Monticello
Purgatorio
In memory of my grandmothers
Cleopatra Beverly
Michelina Petrosino
forza e dolcezza
One
Self-Portrait
Little gal, who knit thee?
Dost thou know who knit thee?
Gave thee milk & bid thee beg
Slid a purse between your legs
Stuffed thy brain with blooms of blight:
algae, wool. You’re lichen-white.
Gave to thee such vicious lungs
for breathing glitter past your wrongs—
Little gal, I’ll tell thee
Little gal, I’ll tell thee!
I, who cut your palms with glass
& poured in poison tasse by tasse
I am nimble. I am young.
I peeled you with a pair of tongs.
I laughed when no one loved you back
& raked the mist to scarf your flesh.
We come together in the dirt.
I a rake & thou a twig;
All day we watch the long pig dig.
All day we watch the long pig dig.
Young
After Anne Sexton
A thousand pilot lights ago
when I’m a teenager half-gone to flab
in a low ranch house crammed
with ribboned handicrafts in January
I go pulling all the false candy canes
from the stale mulch out front
clown-sun blinking whitely over me
my bedroom window an ear
painted shut to keep the calliope of dreams
from sounding. Nearby, the Douglas Fir
thickens over older strings of lights, the chipped
blue bulbs & the gold, each wrapped in peeling floss
& held by keloids to the scruff
of an unloved trunk. Probably a million tiny
ice crystals drift on their rainbow way
while the feverish branches chafe & flake
& I, in my runny custard body
with its buried corkscrew of hate
tell the tree my story-songs
& think God can really hear
above the cold & the snapping plastic canes
boots, belly, my dreams, what’s wrong.
New South
am born
light girl, light girl
each step blessed but slant
born in procession
already my mother, her mother
the same her mother, then
her mother the same
marching by night
under southern pines
or a dream of pines
on the night road
my feet grown strange
my neck turning back
over the dream of land
we left or never left
land of trouble where
I’m always marching
my hair cropped close
my mothers beside me
in robes & crowns so
I go back, go forth
light girl, light girl
crammed with light
& when my mothers say
don’t you tell them about us
don’t you ever tell
I look down hard
at my hands
white webs opening
somehow
strange to
myself
This Is How We Feed the Animals
First, we call them: Blood-Beasts. Double They.
We sense them shining in our net of nerves.
Countless. Pelted. Their mint-smoke smell, closer
than we thought. This is how we track them
with our bone dice, how we dig them a hole
with the knives of our teeth. Will they fall in?
We wait. But when we look, nothing has fallen.
We throw some fresh hay into the hole. We lie
in the sun, considering names. We think
they have names. We think they secrete a liquor
from their tongues which is a cure. Just once
we kissed them: a season of air. But they
wouldn’t stay, or drink from our hands. Now
they come in the dark to hang their muzzles
over our fence lines. We seem to feel their breath
on our backs at night. This is how it is for us
when the egg of sleep will not break:
Grief-Marked. Heart-Lost.
Contagion
I wake up in my body & it’s worse
than a war zone. My smoke-cloud of blood
my hair grenade tick tick boom. It’s worse than
a war zone when I cruise past your brunch. Just
to get bread. Just ordering juice. I open my mouth
& the War rolls out, dense as a foghorn. I can’t
keep from squeezing my skull. I keep time-traveling
back to the noon of my birth. Worse
than a war zone that Sunday, that night, when I wept in the War
of myself. That’s the first war I knew. It was worse
than a wa
r.
Maria
She’d appear in the break before sleep.
Her face a glass zero. Her dark buzzing.
I was twelve. I sweated & begged
to live. Back then, I believed she could
spike me with faith, a silverweed stolon—
she’d appear in the break before sleep
pronouncing my name in her language
of radial burn. Name, name, name, name.
I was twelve. I sweated & begged
in the dark. My sins hummed between us
a ravel of birds, a lightning smell.
She’d appear in the break before sleep
& drift close. As if my face
were hitched to a track which pulled her.
But I was twelve. I sweated & begged
until she dissolved: empty oval of air.
Now I can’t think what I wished for instead.
How I sweated & begged in the break before sleep.
I was twelve. I was twelve. I was twelve.
Elegy
You died in the pith of August. You left us.
On your coffin lid: Going Home. A bluebird there.
Plastic ribbons dripping down. You left us
in a welter of bells & holy water. The Word
of the Lord glazed shut the day. You left us
to our sweat & our complaints, to our swollen wood-
pulp tongues. Of course we U-turned, left
the wrong way home. No birds
glimmered through the balding pines. You left us
to bleat & blister ourselves out, but my words
hung, paint-thick in my chest. Nothing you left us
made sense. Your college of clay cardinals, each bird
a tiny fist of time. Is that what’s left of us
down here? Absent engine, steel-hulled bird
I was laughing over coffee when you left us
for the edge of space. You must’ve felt a sword
of light draw down your spine, & then—you left us
honeycombed, here. No words for the slur
of days that have wept through the world since you left us.
& though I’m middle-named for you (Michelle, a word
for the angel who salts the earth you left us
digging in) my first name knits a tighter cord:
Courteney, dark dweller. I wait where you left us.
Whole 30
After a winter of gluttony & grief
I’m back on plan for good this time.
I’ve ballooned to a specific kind of ugly
the kind you hope to hide
with body spray. But it gets worse
after a winter of gluttony & grief.
I’ve shown up for meatballs. For lemons
whipped to weeping. Now I land my balloon
for the specific kind of ugly
salad oil is. Happy date night, darling.
Happy coconut water + nutritional yeast.
After this winter of gluttony & grief
spring comes, stabbing her hard stem
of anger in the throat. Even garlic scapes
are flat balloons, their ugliness specific
as my penmanship: green tubes of spice
& hate. My body speaks the ugly testament
that took all winter. It says: Gluttony & grief
balloon, darling. Only kindness is specific.
Thigh Gap
It’s true: I have it
though I hardly approve
of anything it does.
Supposed bend of light
or smudge where two odd
angles cross. I hardly see—
can hardly do a thing
with it. White zone of
no flesh pressing
into no. So low, I can’t
scale or measure it. I used
to think: OK! A clean sharp place
to keep. Or: I’ll grow
a thing! to keep, for me! But
no. It’s just a ward
to mark & mount, a loop
I lope around with, so
I count
myself a realm
of realms. I vote & vote.
Turns out, we agree
with everything we
do, almost. We sweep
the precincts
of ourselves: the rooms
between each rib
& under them
till we reach the fat
red condo where
our blood leans in.
We live here now. Half
heart, half townhouse.
Come on down.
Turn on that sweet TV.
Our mise en place, our rugs
& nooks: we’re full
of stuff. We paint
the furniture we couldn’t
live without. It’s true
at last: we have it all
though we hardly know
what any of it does.
First Girdle
For this glob of a girl who feeds like a grub. For her teeming belly-apron. For her frowning navel, sunk like a moon in the night-night lake. For the soft eggs of flab that hatch in her. For marbled thighs & indigo veins, her mattress flank. For a form of firmness, plastic lace tacked down with hidden rivets. For the crisscrossed orbitals of redness at her waist, the pinching tugs she sneaks to force the hems of her culottes down. Poor poreless receptacle for Presidential-fitness-test-sweat, poor pudding poured into too few pans. They haven’t made the polymer that may forgive her, yet. No pastel mesh exists to hold the semisweet chips melting in her mitts, nor the ingots of cold butter she filches from the fridge. What would you give to shunt her starfish hands & aphid appetite? Does anybody have a knife?
Voice Lesson
Hello, dumb vain Bird of Paradise.
Time to shred your lungs’ silk kerchief.
You can’t be pretty mouth & sing.
Want some orange pip pip pips?
Ain’t you lonesome on your little swing?
You dumb vain Bird of Paradise.
I see you doling seeds & ants to nobody.
What a drag. You ain’t made for onliness.
You can’t be pretty mouth & sing!
All alone, all alone, all alone, all alone—
Make your O like an egg. Like an egg, see:
Hell-O. You dumb vain Bird of Paradise.
Don’t swallow them stones. They dead
You can’t be pretty mouth & sing.
Just how long will you peck around here
when you ought to belt & caw? Halloo.
Halloo, you dumb vain Bird of Paradise.
You can’t be pretty mouth & sing.
Little Gals
They come at night
on membranous
wings. I’m a soft deer
browsing the woods
with strands of willow
in my pelt.
When they lean in
to call me out
I shiver & shine
in my thicket
of one.
Do they know
about the botch
in my belly? I think
it’s a gel
where the white light
rots.
One says You know
it’s past time you bred
& opens her mouth
full of egg teeth.
You must have
some kind of hatch for it
says another
Or hole says the third
clicking.
All three hang
in the night air
identical silk faces
identical jaw wires
wanting to scoop me
into their high
humming.
I gallop deep
in shade
past grease-marked trees
to t
he lake
where March mud dashes
up my burning
legs.
But soon
I feel them again
at my belly
spinning
their round nymphal
selves, pressing
their hundred
eyes.
There is a
red delight
in the heat & snap
of their pincers.
They’ve made themselves
so much finer this time
new mouthparts
new bodies burrowing
all through my undercoat
where I let them dig down
into the dim
places.
Sermon
Who shall change my vile body into a glorious body
when I know there’s glory at the end of my prayer?
Who shall change my vile body into a glorious body?
A lioness subdues all things to herself.
Yes, even a lioness subdues all things to herself.
Who shall change my vile body into a glorious body?
When I talk to the lioness, sometimes she answers.
When I talk my dragging talk, this is how she answers:
Your vile body shall change into a glorious body.
I’ve planted my claws in the lioness nation.
With my claws in the dirt, I’ve pledged a whole nation.
But who shall change my vile body into a glorious body?
The Lord makes a lioness. She multiplies in gold.
The Lord makes a wild lioness. Let her multiply in gold.
But how shall my vile body change into a glorious body?
O Lord, if my real life is the lioness hunting—
if she’ll crown me with thunder when I get to her country—
only then shall I come into glory, Lord
when I drown when I drown when I drown when I drown.
Two
Pastoral
Where did it start? In a city of gardens & muck.
When I held someone close, in watery light.
We drank & I bled all the way home.
Red-orange light on my legs. Oh, wow—
that blink-blink of bright, that flip of the pulse.
Where did it start? In the garden, the muck
where insects jumped in starry arcs. My body
took shape, then. A greenhouse I entered alone.
We drank & I bled all the way home.
I wore so many clothes. Cotton, cotton, wool.