Emily Vizzo

Waveland, Mars

Up in my leathers, my formulas

My grandmother cutting away a wet nightgown  

From my mother’s barren legs. What the shining,

The heaven snipers & copper pipes —

 

Light what up, the mallow of wild

 

Heart wood, a swung cornet,

Soprano comet, the baroque & invented valves.

Harmonia me into the good weather. If such a thing,

 

If such a thing exists. I built you the grandest patents,

Neat algorithms felted in goose fat,

The shout, the shout

 

Get off my throat!
Love is a long time, I know that —

 

I darned, I sewed machines into revenant hums.

The name of every bird

 

Married to appetite.

 

All I see are the lingual ancestors.

Like a bugle, wanting order.

 

The comet wants fanfare, a comedy

Swamped in bodily fluids. I have a relationship

 

To the trumpet. Hooks & rotaries, the

Steep & silent shuttle.

 

Panoply of mars.

A dog sniffing the blood of ripe beef daube.

The interior of a pig, garnet-colored.

 

A frozen sow, pitched a fourth above the standard.

 

Your strangled, half-loved fingerings.

A feed dog, a jellied leek.

My mother, with her uneven row of trees.

 

Vinegar on a hard wood floor.

An ugly stitch. The ripeness of cantaloupe.

Rivers named for wolves.

 

Fabrics, they taste differently. The needle, it gives you 15 hours.

A hygienic sound. Double, triple tonguing.

A column of air.

 

Somewhere a ranch. Somewhere a wildfire.

A quilt in American pieces.

The bitter candy of it; a tough & spitting sugar.

 

My shoulders violins, the wrested

Instrumentation of an ottered heart.

Washing my hair with wave scum.

An extravagance of aromatics,

 

A girl upon the kitchen counter in her

Pineapple-printed bathing suit.

 

I loved the awfulness of girlhood, no

Gone-wrong patibulum, no enamored man pleading

 

Guilty to laying hands on infant skin.

Seated on a doctrine at the equinox.

 

Indecency, it fucks & milds me.

 

I dream of Rome the way I dream of daughters,

Histories of angels. A black-painted juniper berried

In a spasm of rain. A rose astonishment

 

Brought me to the Mount of Olives.

It was a debate about taxation.

Eldered daughters eating from raw jism stars.

Aristotle’s First, unmoving Mover.

A war on girls.

 

Some say there are four worlds and ours is the last, the island world.

 

I can take milk into my mouth like anyone.

But you know,

 

It hurts.

 

Chapel me, daughter.

 

I drink three cups of silence.

A rational wiggery.

 

That you:

 Make a fine salad of my intellect. The:

 Honey, the lemon, the crushed moon salt.

 

Some botanists split the hazels, the tropical commons,

Babies in coracles. A scattering of daughter light.

 

What I quit in a generosity of hip.

The infant brain-fat.

 

The cultivation of catkins. The hazel flowers, the hedgerows.

A pretty blue train, an Epiphany tree in winter.

The intimacy of jasmines.

 

A fine and neural powder, forking over buried water.

I draw a circle around myself. A circle. A daughter.

 

A crown of twigs.

Three pins of hazel wood to protect my flaming,

My given home from fire.

 

 

 


“Waveland, Mars” is from Giantess (YesYes Books, 2018).