Kirsten Kashock


Exaltation

O skin. Inside you my bags
and rivers find language. If ever
I wished rid of your grammar—
if ever I wished flay (strung
over white laundry in sinew
and that opulent crimson-going-black
beneath jeweled buzz, only gray tail
furred still, a stole at wrong end amidst
such incoherent caterwaul there was no
determining end) I was wrong
to wish it. Although you stutter
you spit more than before and fit
me ill—I listen like a fish through purple
under-eye sleeplessness and know
if soul then soul is not pools, is
the scratch and brush the near-static of
your seven-day renewal. You alter
but refuse to clear scar. Even
as you double over, retract within me
vocals of aureole, of freckle, mole
and the worm-slash up my ankle-back
-calf where I gave unnatural
loud birth to a slippery achilles, newly
twinned, eel-shredded, I accept you
unbook are my best record and home.


love poem

This is a love poem for the person
for whom lying every
night beside me
means somehow we're beyond flutter
Another person's poems
when he's in the bathroom I used to
bring back something inside me

Devastated is a word the other
person, the poet, would laugh at
to cure me but here is my o
here is my love who thinks love
should get quickly past
the knees. That to leave flutter
takes less than ten years


The Cellini Venus

a forgery is
something worthy of making
love to

small is in this case
exquisite in other
cases small

the system of
protection springing
from the object

is what is exhibited
the worth of a love
story inheres

to how much lying
is done by whom for
what intent

she was my favorite
he is everyone's
guilty replacement


there is naked

feel driving without
glasses in the just post-dusk
the world observed

is altered and hurting
the lights we live by don't
belong along that wood


there is this

naked feel too
: being naked under
a ceiling

fan post-coitus or
because you were tired
too tired to dress

-all poems gathered from her blog, Negative Wingspan