A Venomous Rest & Tin Nights

Abstract

23 CLAYRE BENZADÓN A Venomous Rest & Tin Nights • A Venomous Rest I must not sleep for while I’m asleep I think I’m dying. I’m the queen of sleep when I stop thinking, which is never. A dream can be a spinning wheel, or an apple that a princess has sliced with her teeth to feed me while my eyes are closed. They only begin to flicker once my fingertips tingle— she laps at them, the pulp, just the tip, to drain 24 the poison out and spit, lather it all over my lips. 25 Tin Nights Winter. Tin wine. Wired nights. Tired twins of light touching a hot dawn, a waned cot in the month of the moth. I can taste the tin of the sky: a palatable lateness. The iron taste of blood, meat and tame desire— no stars out tonight. ‘ Something that did exist: A peck on the back of the neck, a moth, the mouth of an antic god, the core of a star apple, milk fruit marking the way to pain, the link of existence, the vital salt of our body— our frame an ochre moon stabbed with a few cloves in it like a pomander, a red, damp dream, an apple pored with dare and sun tacking the strike of a musky split-ribboned secret. 26 Notes “A Venomous Rest” Line 3 taken (and slightly altered) from Anne Sexton’s “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)” “Tin Nights” Line 12 from Olga Broumas’s “Sleeping Beauty” Line 14 adapted from Sexton’s “Knee Song Poem:” “being kissed on the back / of the knee is a moth [. . .]” Line 15 title taken from Lucile Clifton’s “Antic God” Line 18 from Olga Broumas’s “Beauty and the Beast” Line 19 from Olga Broumas’s “Sleeping Beauty” Line 20 the metaphor of “ochre moon” is taken from Sharon Olds’s “The Moment” Line 21 adapted from Sylvia Plath’s “A Secret”: “stab a few cloves in an apple” ...