Heavy In Your Head by Vanessa Willoughby

Poetry Potion | September 25th, 2014 | current issue, poetry | No Comments

Poet Bio

i am your disaster pornography
flash floods
of blood
glory and gore.
a firewalker
flowing limber on command.

every sliver of killing silence
forms the stones of calculated courtship.
you found enlightenment chasing
modern romance for broken coquettes lapping
up the coded semantics of court jesters.

i can swallow your name smooth
like a hymn or a curse or clean river water.
but it makes me smaller,
a baby-skull-soft [restrict]snail shell cowering
under a Nazi’s black boot.

i can pull out my guts
drape them across glass like dead butterflies and
dance across singing switchblades
to turn you on.
you want a hard woman
fashioned from strips
of Burkowski’s faceless mistresses.
the cruelest thing you ever did
was to say that a kiss is just a kiss.

i’ve met your kind before.
i’m waiting for you to crawl on your snake belly
and call me unhinged or hysterical or crazy.
i know your heart of darkness, Kurtz
the villainy of your expeditions
the price of your attention.
my body is sugar and honey and heroin
for men that confuse sex with
the terrorism of grooming chattel.
you only say that i’m better than your other girls
when i leave your bed
and you can turn your back on the world.

if i survive
i will bury you
down to the earth’s crust
and leave the grave unmarked.
[/restrict]

Poet Bio

Vanessa Willoughby is a graduate of Emerson College and The New School.

 

Words

this article was published in our print quarterly number seven, Words.

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