Laurie Blauner

Metamorphosis

Relax and choose change.  View skin fumbling against bone, an infinite spider, the incentives that hug you everywhere.  It’s not what's missing but more-than-you-need, a path that requires further definition. 

No closer than this to wholesale. 

Conceive me, beside you, yellow eyes escaping and reappearing.  You'll see false versions, sky leaking inside buildings, someone else's claws and fur. 

You're not sure what you want.  You can't stop your forehead from floating.  Your lips evidence biology.  Your eyebrows misplaced.  Your cheeks, taut and ungiving, circle your pointed ears. 

Take the pebble from the animal’s mouth.  Speak with it.

 

Be Like the Others

Meat is everyone.  Except with a name like Too-Far-Away or Nobody-Special.  The ancestors created beauty from bones on doorsteps, skin was parchment for another story, the musical sound of fingernails.  Dancing during cannibal time the Self-Contained Man tried to dislodge the people inside, waiting to breathe the archaic air. 

They asked too much.  Tomorrow’s episode could happen too soon.  History was stubborn and people repeated themselves.  But wasn’t he made of the missing?  When he sang someone else’s song the Others rose, unstoppable, like a drink filling a glass.  Be a different story, they said.  Be what is picked from between a woman’s teeth. 

Originally published in Lake Effect

Laurie Blauner is the author of six books of poetry and a poetry chapbook from dancing girl press as well as three novels and a novella.  Her web site is http://www.laurieblauner.com