When all is destroyed, what remains will be perfect—
White women taste like chicken,
Pot bellied and drunk on cheap wine and gin,
Barefoot, pregnant, hit by a speeding police car,
In a perpetual state of half-sleep,
Joyce and Eliot Pre-code and pornographic
Inventing the dark joy of universal creation
It was 1931, the night as dark as charcoal—
Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre adding up to reasonable doubt while Emily frigs herself until she explodes, somewhere in the dark a woman is shitting in a man’s mouth
For love or money, her eyes wide as patriotic light bulbs,
Tits like grease fires, the mother of giants—
Her ass blue, Italian and gassy,
Hanging her upside down by her feet at two AM
Where she sees God reading the paper—
She’s not paranoid or transparent,
Time a harmonious figure eight covered in salt water,
I forgot about her but not really—
I can never forget but why should I remember,
What is she to me that I should remember her?
A stranger on a train sitting across from me in the subway in brown wool stockings she knows I know,
She wants it that way, that way I remember her—
I remember her mother too,
The fat chicken-skinned housewife’s poster in my bedroom,
I used to draw with lines but now have no need for shapes
There is only one teenager that I need—
A lesbian with a PhD in Art History
Then I would never need to touch myself
Or the red haired dentist or the dark space
Between her swollen breasts—
There is only one teenager I need,
Only one melody I need to hear—
Her closed eyes and big feet like stars—
When I needed her she came and I rejected her
In her white stockings on her knees
Though she willingly walked down the steps
To the basement where everything had been destroyed
Where everything was perfect,
Where there were no shapes,
Only mothers in denim and mothers in Spandex
And daughters in Latex and naked daughters’ bodies,
Six each divided by time, her brown eyes in my pocket—
Her flesh having no color and no top or bottom—
No beauty or shape like ancient geometry,
No blue thing, no scarlet, no purple—
When all is destroyed, what remains will be perfect—
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