"Blood Orange" (Revised)

As the spasms fade and salt
dries on the skin, you fold
back into yourself, a consumed
blood orange restored in a film
run in reverse: tongue-caressing
juices flow back into bruised
segments which rise and swing
together again into a sphere,
a world of flesh closed
and complete within itself;
then you shrug once more
into the malleable skin
and reattach yourself
to the swaying branch, among
but not of the others, absorbed
by the surge of your own ripening
until the sun presses so deeply
into your center the need
to spill sweet light opens
you once more.

New Post in "The Jackdaw's Nest"

"A Short Collection of Short Canadian Poems"

Anyone Know . . .

why Frank Wilson hasn't made any posts to Books Inq since last Thursday? It's not like him to not post without an explanation.


***

Update re Julie: It's just a refresh problem with my link, not a problem with Frank. Thanks, Julie.

New Post in "The Jackdaw's Nest"

A bit different than usual: An Onion Bouquet

"Theory My Natural Brown Ass" by Sonnet L'Abbé

In the absence of any poems of my own currently, here is a delightful poem by the Canadian poet Sonnet L'Abbé :

"Theory My Natural Brown Ass"

I've paid for too many degrees,
posited too many historical positions,
made too many semiotic apologetics,
forwarded far too many feminist responses
to too many textual materialities

to have an ass this big.

In theory, my ass
does not signify.

But this insistence of the body,
this non-linguistic expression
of inertia and caloric lust,
is a corporeal truth that mental exercise
can't deconstruct.

Or is it just an inverted absence?
The presence of the lack
of any Aryan heritage?

I'm the post-colonial girl
who went abroad and squatted and lunged
while the maid, snapping out
wet laundry, watched.
Skinny brown bitch, was what I thought!
The poor men looked at my ass
like it was a pair of Boston Cremes.

But I was raised
on white girls' dreams.
This juicy back might fly in hip hop,
but I meant to fit
into tinier social circles,
and JLo's butt's already taking up
two stools at the representation bar.
Missy E's already gone
bonh bo bonh bonh
all the way to the bank.

My ass doesn't give a shit
that my mind is post third wave.
It is imperialist, a booty-Gap,
expanding into a third space: the place

beyond my seams. Who cares
that sizes are all 'seems' anyway:
you shop, you walk
the slippery significatory slope
on which an 'S', 'M', or 'L' might fall.
The mall

is the spatial organization
of desire, I know, but
does that make my ass look small?