Category: Monica Ferrell

by Monica Ferrell

You need me like ice needs the mountain

On which it breeds. Like print needs the page.

You move in me like the tongue in a mouth,

Like wind in the leaves of summer trees,

Gust-fists, hollow except of movement and desire

Which is movement. You taste me the way the claws

Of a pigeon taste that window ledge on which it sits,

The way water tastes rust in the pipes it shuttles through

Beneath a city, unfolding and luminous with industry.

Before you were born, the table of elements

Was lacking, and I as a noble gas floated

Free of attachment. Before you were born,

The sun and the moon were paper-thin plates

Some machinist at his desk merely clicked into place.

from You Darling Thing Find more by Monica Ferrell at the library

Copyright © 2018 Monica Ferrell
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Monica Ferrell

After the snakebite, I tried to make noises

With the clouds in my throat, the dissolving

Snow of my tongue: but the young ones

Kept crying and calling and couldn’t hear me.

How could I have explained anyway my surprise?

Not the kiss of the branding iron,

Not the crop’s electric shock, the bit’s silver

Felt ever as sweet to me as his firm teeth.

Decline is a river you fall into, your hind legs

Unsteady on the slippery bank.

Your last sight a spray of delicious gillyflowers

Bright enough to be suns.

There’s so much you realize you’ll never miss.

Mornings in the sludgy mist. The saddle hours.

The way children comb and braid your mane

Then look at you as though for repayment.

In the ring, on the bridle path, how enormous I

Was floating above them while they rode me

As I practiced the art of surrender,

Holding my thoughts separate as a kite—

I might as well have been on my own planet of dust,

Forever careering through shadow fields

Till I saw those eyes sparking green from the dark,

Till I let him shake my body with one touch.

from You Darling Thing Find more by Monica Ferrell at the library

Copyright © 2018 Monica Ferrell
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Monica Ferrell

You are sexier than anyone I’ve ever met.

You feel better to touch than anyone I’ve ever met.

You’re like a Vargas girl.

You’re not exactly a barrel of laughs

so much as a barrel of erections.

Dear Gypsy-themed Barbie doll:

those jeans will do you no good.

If I were a mosquito, I’d suck

all the blood out from you in five minutes.

If we were stranded together on a desert island,

I don’t think you’d last long.

I’d like to come over there and squeeze the living daylights out of you.

I’d like to spin you like a top

and fuck you ten different ways.

Such tender meat—raw—dropping from the bone!

You’re sex on a stick.

You’re a sex bomb.

You’re the sex symbol of our set.

And this is why you have the male friends

you think you do, why women hate you.

The last twelve years, you have no idea

how many millions of haploid gametes I’ve spilled in your honor!

How I’ve resented you for walking around

as though you were a normal person.

I’m sorry to break it to you.

Let me explain how this works: when X said

he threw away your press photo, what he meant was

it’s tacked up in his bathroom right now, for inspiration.

I think you think my attraction to you is funny.

Believe me, scared is how you should be.

You’re a basket of sexual fruits.

What kind of fruit are you?

I’d like to eat you up with my penis

but I don’t know how to do that!

You smell like peach. You smell like mango.

The way you smell drives me crazy,

the divots in your back drive me wild.

I love the scoop above your ass—your slender throat—

your little pretty limbs and princess-face—

your gorgeous rippling muscles covered

all over by this smooth, this tawny upholstery—

little doll—delicate ower—the way your ribs

stick out, it’s like a second rack—and this,

I love this: what do people call it?

You should always be naked.

You should always hold your wineglass like so.

You have what no one else has—breasts

that demand to be taken notice of

and the tiniest waist I’ve ever seen.

If your waist were any smaller, you wouldn’t exist.

from You Darling Thing Find more by Monica Ferrell at the library

Copyright © 2018 Monica Ferrell
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Monica Ferrell

White, incorruptible, a slip of moon

filming the reed-bordered waters of a pond,

he sits, or rather slumps, against the glass.

He’s in no hurry. The world is here,

now and then it drags up an agonized eye

to plead with him—Mahavir, tiny Nero.

Gently, almost wincing, he smiles

as though waiting for me to finish my sentence.

Unborn. A door through which possibility

never walked. Flute no one ever played.

Once his cells were assembling their lace,

his mother was blinking into the sunlight.

Perhaps his invitation was lost in the mail,

though perhaps it’s just as well. After all,

he’s not missing much—except everything.

The inventions of lust, the pageantry of what.

from You Darling Thing Find more by Monica Ferrell at the library

Copyright © 2018 Monica Ferrell
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Monica Ferrell

Man shaped out of mud

And made to speak and love—

Let’s stick in him a little whisperer,

A bucket with two holes.

Let’s give him the Great Deceiver,

A blood-stone.

A church with a vaulted ceiling

Where the White and Blue Niles meet.

A dog who cries after dark.

Everyone has a heart,

Even the people who don’t.

It floats up like a beached whale in the autopsy.

The heart has no sense of humor.

It offers itself piteously like a pair of handcuffs

And is so clumsy that we turn away.

The past

Is a quarryful of marble statues

With heads and genitals erased,

But the heart is a muscle made of sharkbone and mutters,

Resting place softened with hay

Where all the cows come, finally, home.

from You Darling Thing Find more by Monica Ferrell at the library

Copyright © 2018 Monica Ferrell
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Monica Ferrell

This time we’ll come gloved & blind-

folded, we’ll arrive on time.

With bees in our hair,

with an escort of expiring swans.

We’ll appear to out-of-date & out-of-tune

violin music, we’ll lie on our side.

Wearing rotting lotus behind our ears,

musk between our thighs.

This time we’ll be tied down.

We’ll cry out.

We’ll only smoke if surprised

by tragedy’s approach, as it noses closer.

This time we’ll fall in love

with the blood color

of the sunset as we’re walking home

over the bridge that takes us

between here & there.

This time we’ll forget

how ancient Sarmatian lions go on

bearing marble messages for no one

who can understand their sarcophagus language,

forget sloths who climb so slow

they die before mating.

We’ll grow improvident & stop believing

there was ever such a thing

as alone, such a hard

nail in the coffin

for one.

from You Darling Thing Find more by Monica Ferrell at the library

Copyright © 2018 Monica Ferrell
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Monica Ferrell

Old men on fourth-story balconies stare down at me,

Children pass by playing ball.

A mother takes in her plain tablecloth, frowning.

I will die

If before nightfall no one touches me.

There is a hospital in this town called Gli Incurabili,

They will take me there and lay me down on the bed like an ivory blade.

I will be pure as a virgin offering empty hands to Christ

And the world will throb beneath me like sea’s blue beneath its white.

from You Darling Thing Find more by Monica Ferrell at the library

Copyright © 2018 Monica Ferrell
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Monica Ferrell

There is nothing beautiful here

However I may want it. I can’t

Spin a crystal palace of this thin air,

Weave a darkness plush as molefur with my tongue

However I want. Yet I am not alone

In these alleys of vowels, which comfort me

As the single living nun of a convent

Is comforted by the walls of that catacomb

She walks at night, lit by her own moving candle.

I am not afraid of mirrors or the future

—Or even you, lovers, wandering cow-fat

nd rutting in the gardens of this earthly verge

here I too trod, a sunspot, parasol-shaded,

Kin to the trees, the bees, the color green.

from You Darling Thing Find more by Monica Ferrell at the library

Copyright © 2018 Monica Ferrell
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Monica Ferrell

At dusk words float,

Blue-fingered, without weight

In a world gone fragrant

As a gold egg cradling rose-pink yolk.

Timid at first, stilled like deer at a lake,

Now they gather to me, who pretends sleep,

Covering my face with their hands.

In the memory palace, the dead

Take short breaths.

Shamans breathe a name for who I am.

Shamans litany me into being.

I open my cold eyes, my throat.

I enter the bath, let the waters

Close over me like a gem,

Then reach for my anklet,

My red bolt of silk.

The sun rises.

From the mysterious generosity of a mother,

The sun rises.

—This time I will not be false, this time, I will be

Clear from all falsehood like a snake from its last season’s skin.

from You Darling Thing Find more by Monica Ferrell at the library

Copyright © 2018 Monica Ferrell
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Monica Ferrell

At the end of the night a poisonous star

Rises above Petersburg like a cancer-spot.

Cats, fevered, untranslatable,

Go long ways for secrets and fish heads.

Amorists hide in the alcoves

Of the swollen city, guarding their possessions;

I feel the feral marble machine of my heart

Leak mercury, my veins warm

When I hear two lovers twittering

In the chalice of their arms . . . There is something

Deliciously final about you, she says,

I cannot say what it is.

I cannot say who you are, he says,

Remind me.

from You Darling Thing Find more by Monica Ferrell at the library

Copyright © 2018 Monica Ferrell
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.