Katherine MacCue

PAPER WOMEN

We went to see the museum installation.

Ceiling wired mechanical boxes

with rubber lips sucked up

translucent paper from corner piles,

dropping

each piece onto

the floor –

they were so transparent

you could see the pieces that

had come before,

their edges singed and shorn.

You said they were like

sad women,

women in bars with

their fried hair

and a gaze stuck on

a cracked reflection, dizzying

their way to the bottoms

of beer bottles.

I did not believe it

until, walking back

to the metro, I looked

underneath my shoe

and layer

           upon

         layer

came back to me clear:

pieces of a uniform skin,

drowning. 

HOMESICK

A jaw dislocated from the hook

a corkscrew twisted upward,

and inside. I don't know

where to spill

so I spill everywhere.

Trains magnify the distance.

Planes distance the magnifier.

My brain hasn't shut down,

the circadian rhythm has been

displaced, toppled to the murmur

of light and dark exchanging

secrets.

Either way, I'm someone

shuffling through my purse

for the keys to a motel room.

In every memory,

I'm the interloper,

uninvited but tolerated.

I click my jaw again

I could slice my body in two,

the unhealthy things I've done

under the gun,

the pressure of the Epicranius

under the photographic lens,

surgical knives, waist buckles,

cucumber slices over the eyes.

The meth addicts

clamp-jawed grind behind

the motel is, at times,

a kind of music, their moonfire-lit tempo

against the silver spoon wafts

out of trailers at midnight,

and it's a kind of damage my heart has

grown fond of.

Katherine MacCue is a Puschart-Prize nominated poet who lives in New York with her dog, Blue. She's been published in various journals and can been reached at Kvmacc.blogspot.com