Home > Poetry > Today, Worn and Broke’t, I Make Demands of my Lover
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Published: Fri Oct 15 2010
Eva Lundsager, Were now like (detail), 2021, oil on canvas
Today, Worn and Broke’t, I Make Demands of my Lover

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.

See what's inside AGNI 72

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.

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