I hate when you show up
in my small worlds! The ones I craft
out of alabaster and child’s math, oases
lacking long fingers and necks worth gnawing,
be careful, you had said, she will see the mark.
In the small worlds, the hotels banned
elevators! Travel depends more on trampolines,
each one blessed with a side-eyeing
grandmother to carry your baggage, who conspires
in her free time to make a bagpipe
out of your stomach. The small worlds
exist between the mind and the soul, there is
one troll to whom you must pay toll. She demands
you empty your purse of Pepsi
cans, single servings of anthrax, wax strips
big enough for the armpits, leave behind the cloth
skin of your panties, pitiful macaroni art,
and she points to the fruit in your breast pocket;
that too. She wants that too. All this work to return
to small worlds to get away from you,
and yet here you are! Floating in the lazy river
of my girlhood, sipping root beer from a straw bent
in the shape of a heart. Your sunglasses are
so hideous I want to wear them; your lips curled,
your eyes tinted with mischief. I won’t fall
for this nonsense—instead I’ll take private lessons
from Patrick Swayze on a nearby beach, yes
he is one sexy, despicable man who is allowed in
my dreams, cause all he wants to do is dance
with me. I remember when that used to be you, but
outside the small worlds you ignore my emails,
spend your days picking switches from a cottonwood
and eating porridge for supper. Not in the small worlds!
There is no guilt, there is only us, there is I who is not
a blemish nor a private leper who dances
lesions for you. No, I am simply a woman who books
a hotel room to jump on the mattress! To play that game
where you hop, magnificent, from bed to bed! I know now
why you are here: to share this room with me
as you did before, when in our play your dark head
kept hitting the headboard and I thought
my hands would be good enough to save you
from a knot, these brief concoctions of bone
and loss! In the small worlds, I do not hold your skull
but your hand, and we jump from one mattress to the next. bloated roses that oranged, one by one, to dumplings,
chin hairs stubborn as blackened tree stumps, a fluttering
in my right eye that could be mistaken for a brand new heart-
beat, men in my dreams with polite names like Stephen
or Nicholas, biblical, of course! He gave me another bouquet
loud with white herbaceous peonies, refugees of dog hair
cornered in the bedroom, a refusal to masturbate due to visions
only of you, that whimpering hue, your begging tune, God
gave me ankles reinforced so unlike Achilles, I would not go
down fighting for a man, a closet full of nightgowns I know
ladies have died in, the patterns always boasting flowers, why
must women go to bed in flowers? He gave symphonies by
nymphs intent on throat-ripping, gave redheads who sing
of cosmic wine, at times, I cannot listen for it reminds me too
much of the night, but do not fret, the Lord gave me dishes
caked by dried soups, tortellini bursting with three cheeses,
a therapist who lied about owning a yellow couch, quilts eerily
close to cocoons. I have forgotten the sunflowers. God gave
me sunflowers, twisted worlds of gold, and words he cannot
stop choking me with, and worst of all he gave me your silence.
I did not want it. I in my dress so selfish asked for anger, asked
for riots, for blood staining my teeth, a sound that a girl can
see. But this silence, like a lock of hair, I braided it, whored it.
On days when you are not close, I choose to bring it to my nose. Pity the girl who spends her brilliance on the most
fecund of carrion; the schoolboys who blubber poems
in the rhythm of hopelessness, who let loose rotting
horses, their baby-parades of heavy cream and carcass!
Shake the girl kneeling for the bowl filled half-full—
teach her how to hike a skirt, spare a piss standing,
bliss a bowl before she kicks it all over the carpet as if
Lionel Messi birthed her spirit. Welcome to the era
of the ravenous, of us writing with freshly pulled
canines, of licking the blood from every tip as di Prima
did. Our goddess? A praying mantis wearing false
lashes. The president? A black widow that swallowed
the Declaration of Independence. Praise the girl waking
to find her bed empty, heart so fat it’s got a belly,
who rolls over to kiss her framed portrait of the Virgin
Mary, the blue scarf showing just a lil bit of cleavage.


Kale Hensley is a West Virginian by birth and a poet by faith. You can keep up with them at kalehens.com.