Ode to Lelo® and Moths, and: My Demon Is Sad All It Can Be Is Complicit

Abstract

Ode to Lelo® and Moths, and: My Demon Is Sad All It Can Be Is Complicit Paula Mendoza (bio) Ode to Lelo® and Moths After jacking off, a formless feeling.Sense arrests, blank drone thru finebranching blood vessels, my levelmiddling, trawled mud come upbent mufflers and smashed bats.Salt worn or coral. Mercury, oilor lead. Hose or rope or cuttlefish.Nothing is sick that exists; the sick exist.A category for every existing sicknessyou can customize an endless chromatics—Martin or Mitchell or Kline or de Kooning.Every peg a pitch a plummet warmingup and down in octave, in specter—fa, so, lawhat's depth got to do with it? Que serasera, verily, what does the divine? Peelshift and bark, scales and scab, undressand in your bare body, hardy trunk, inyour felled beast pose— breathedeep. Listen. Against glasstaps scarabs, powdery lunae, little sucksand many many-legged, wings on wingsscrawling clef notes. The subject: Lust. Percuss. [End Page 88] My Demon Is Sad All It Can Be Is Complicit If reading between parallel realities, your mother. Somebody will always be saying goodbye. They are being sucked into the distance or you are being pulled away. Here is what I know: I've shot this scene before. My feet blistered to get here. Not rut or habit but mandala. I ripple out and out {{petalpetalpetalpetalpetalpetalpetalpetal}} such a showy peony! Boatload is a family and I am too sensitive meaning my feelings are not activist. Go straight to the rot of your happiness. The ground conveys bodies apart. It will be many knots before the wailing subsumes. We are each of us abandoned. All I know folds the page corner of the glyph shift's falter towards intelligible. I swear I made it happen inside. My Siamesis no longer spoken. We are severed. They've hunted Babylons to extinction. Our mothers diversify their brood. Koan is the head split not the egg hatched. In certain light our features cannot be believed. Healed like no venom's business. Hallucine, nauseaesque. Cortisol irksome. Fever gullies magma into desertscape, some vast beige. Fire, then, is mine. Mine is thy fire. Then bested under mantle's shellac. Crushed a harder heat, weh? Psalter grommet this clinclin, weh? Nihil inkarra ashwa patay. Bata, umuwi kana. Tumahimik kana. Indoors I'm the nine of bulls. Batten down the crystal, Mobius, I'm goring for the kill. [End Page 89] Paula Mendoza Paula Mendoza's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Bat City Review, The Collagist, and Parcel. She earned her MFA at the University of Michigan and is currently a PhD candidate the University of Utah. She reviews poetry for SCOUT and is an assistant poetry editor at Newfound. Copyright © 2017 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents