Ann Pedone

from While Marie

Spoon it better out into this light. Large and then larger sounds. After a clumsy drink or two. Bellies and horns, Chinese deities filling up with another ordinary language. Cannibal and yet highly self-aware progenitors. Rear-ended, blind-sided, retrieved. And then swiftly de-sexed. What would I do otherwise? The fires are intermittent, at best. Something calmly erotic humming in the distance. Its relation to power and my own unlimited paranoia is still to be determined. By the hand that put something blue and raw up inside of me. 

When everything under the sun is unrecorded pre-existing condition. An exercise in walking straight down the middle of downtown Manhattan looking for a completely different version of Medieval Spanish history. Without which, I would be the same person I am today. So many rectangles. Violet sun on my face. This is the fallen shape of linguistic intention. Where the weather’s perfect, coffee’s weak, but the mouth dry as a doorframe. And the man who whispers to you from the other side of the sauna. Girls who covet hanging around steel-reinforced walls. When given the choice, I’ll take the pile of discarded sheets. The sexual leisure of spinal column. Your jars of salmon fat and brisket. Come early. Rub some of whatever just came out of you on the taffeta underside of my hideous dress. Trap the lyric in a glass tube. Hold it up. Know the plushness of florescent. But not quite. That’s only prelude to the temperature of the thing. Left enormously unsung. An unfolding drama of field horse and cologne. I want to beg you for it but they won’t let me. They’ve given me this cellophane instead. Three horse heads on a fine porcelain plate. My brilliant mirror. Tell me, how long, exactly, will I feel this way? As is the case with all strictly hellenized land acts. Speech acts. Cabaret acts. Unpleasant acts. Memory acts. Fungal acts. Child bride acts. Dental acts. Subprime acts. Delusional acts. Penile acts. Forgiven acts. Spatial acts. Of which there are always far too many doilies and other missing rubber hoses. Maxi pad gone seriously blue and sour. I want its memory and all of its faux sexual consent. I want its misguided gender arguments and hot glue gun stash. Don’t swim past it. I’m so aesthetic. I pay for everything in cash. A classic Proto Indo-European/OPEC state of mind. Five or six anchovies left on his plate. Cellphone a brand-new shade of turpentine pink. Into myself dissected. Bronzed. Refrigerated. I’ll be waiting on the far side of your property line. Calling out in the last working language we share. The recording will continue. So be a dear and turn the sound up.

These once and particular growing seasons I’m inventing a new system of day commerce. Drainage tubes and low-level fussing. Of which there are so many non-sexual opposites. Eating in the cafeteria. Trouble breast-feeding. Fuzz. Every concept is washed until song. It’s the thin meat of history she wants. Which some big-bellied animals are able to do effortlessly.

A man goes to sleep and dreams of flood lights, the one true and pure religion, projected population growth in the Suez. What his train ticket reveals is that his lover is in the kitchen. Meeting the last linguistic milestone. He wants to appeal. She wants a better mechanics of SOUND. Pock-marked or otherwise. Staring up inside the vaginal canal. Noticing her slightly tremoring hands. Hunger as dominance. I could say, take the A Train, but then what would come of the goats up on the mountain, the ones who still refused to be inseminated? Drank himself polysyllabic. If there were a cure for go, go, gone, I would give you some bread. An anvil. An invitation to my aunt’s wedding. And this impossibility of linguistic escape. It keeps me up at night. Makes my small craft hover. Just as the waves endlessly spoken. Golden ticket. Golden roster. Golden rod. Out of fear he forgets the sound of each footstep. And since one minute of sighing is the most sexual of animals. Part smokescreen. Part hummingbird. Part talcum powder dream. Lift me up into my miles of days. For each month, another trapdoor, for each year, another empty bed the sad novelist has to describe. And then the camera stops. On the knees of a woman who has stopped for a coffee. She doesn’t speak the language. She’s twenty or fifty years old. Once again, her check has bounced. Her white uniform is out to dry. The message carved on every stone in her collection. “Things get pretty clear when you have your hands in your pockets.” It’s a drowning. Or it might simply be an indication of an unpredictable glowing. The morning of it. I want to eat it.

You think of this person. He is your own. A yolk gently falling to the bottom of a bottle of scotch. Afterward or before you carry him in your mouth for nine months. Gently. Godly. The cold rain meets all of your expectations. 

It leaks out all over your beautiful face. Scares the neighbors. Wants to meet your daughter. It’s made of netting and bronze and seam bream. Its sperm covers the entire building and the sky. Against my left leg. Up to the rafters. Aroused as four starlings left behind in the nest. Two men who fuck in an architecturally important building. Afterwards they will 

Zip up their pants and drive out to the next county. Enter their best key lime pie for first prize. Today my goats hatched all over the sidewalk. I am breastfeeding one of them as we speak.

Ann Pedone’s books include The Medea Notebooks and The Italian Professor’s Wife. Her poetry, non-fiction, and reviews have been published widely.  Ann’s project “Liz” was a finalist for the 2024 Levi’s Prize. She has been nominated for Best of Net and the Pushcart multiple times. Ann is the founder and editor-in-chief of the journal and small press, αntiphony.