To the drowned birds, locked in feather parquet:
here’s to primitive machinery, to nail beds
and chipped bone, to placing arrows across our abdomens digestive
contractions, oh Jamie Lee Curtis,
oh my god.
To our hips, warring with occipital
lobes, to maids who force–fed us and
pared down our options to an
astronaut, a frotteurist, a shamrock, a
kayak, or pitchfork.
I loved you the way you scored my skin
with the trigonometry of monogamy
then tuned my rusting throat to the
crisp, iced bell that cracks a Danish
village morning.
I loved you the way you grunioned, the way you
Trembled post–stable hijinks–me with
Canadian Club clutched in fingerless leather as
a Dravidian equestrian. I rip the itch from gender,
arrive with it as
an operative at the state dinner and drown
the finches in the party pool. I put my ear
to
the vetch. It’s so pregnant and truthful. It releases
honey from its most tiny
trumpet: all melted sweet, and
sticky valves.
Lina ramona Vitkauskas is the author of Spiny Retinas (Mutable Sound, 2014); Professional Poetry (White Hole Press, 2013); A Neon Tryst (Shearsman Books, 2013); Honey is a She (Plastique Press, 2012); and The Range of Your Amazing Nothing (Ravenna Press, 2010).
She is the recipient of the Henry Miller Memorial Library Ping Pong Journal Prize (selected by Eleni Sikelianos) and The Poetry Center of Chicago’s Juried Reading Award (selected by Brenda Hillman).
Publications include Spork, Coconut, The Awl, DIAGRAM, Tarpaulin Sky, The Chicago Review, The Toronto Quarterly–among many others.
With Larry Sawyer, she has co-edited milk magazine (since 1999). She has also served as a part-time faculty member at the Chicago School of Poetics for 2011-2013. Her website is here .