My legs sewn up into the bed
love-blanched
and the window ledge appears—welcome, welcome!
Then you, lover,
(nursemaid, murderer)
a bare chest, panting, as if your ribs
are a spoked pump.
I wear my hair in two pointed buns,
like a great horned owl,
(or plastic owl barn-mounted
to fear-off vermin).
I love you
hatefully.
Lover, I whisper,
shut your mouth-pit.
Play me a song on the buzznack_.
Up you go and I will surely die like this,
scrawny, a-bed,
an azzardly beast,
a burdalone,
if not for you—so fat and butterine.
Give me the glee-dream
before the fleshtailor arrives
before I give in
to the leechcraft
and learn to desire the tight suction
on skin,
the danzyheaded lightness
from a slow loss of blood.
Julianna Baggott is the author of over twenty books, including two New York Times Notable Books of the Year, Pure and Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders. Her latest is a collection of poems called Instructions, Abject & Fuming. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, AGNI, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere, and read on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. She is a professor of screenwriting at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts and faculty director at Vermont College of Fine Arts. For more information, visit juliannabaggott.com. (updated 10/2017)
Her AGNI poem “To My Lover, Concerning the Yird-Swine” from AGNI 72 was chosen for The Best American Poetry 2011.