Arsenic Lobster
poetry journal |
Issue Twenty-one Winter 2009 |
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Potato Eyes Joshua Diamond What lovely eyes you have my darling like hard-boiled eggs sliced through the middle: yellow and white and oh so trite. And oh so bored you make me so I cook—not cook but boil—everything: hams and yams and oh so green cabbages. Yes. Cabbages and potatoes and toes like eyes and nails like moons—sliver and white and oh so silvery bones. And your eyes are trout—not trout but salmon—pink like salmon and lemon grass stench. And every time you scream I clench the starchy meat unearthed by till until they scald in handsome heat and drown your eyes in liquid calm. * * * So long my darling off to market to fetch a pale of oh so sweet and sin replete with mandates seated in a row of baker's scorn—not scorn but scones—and butcher's paper lined with blood and happy homes for all the people in bread houses falling in their parchment bones. And in the hunger lines they wait for avarice's end and government cheese. And by degrees delicately sated in defiant patronage. * * * I boiled it down to the last red russet, boiled it all with clams and cream— not cream but happenstance and onions— stinging our eye-yolks like laughter in a paper cup. |