The Literary Review
I regret
we ever met,
coming out of a Rascals concert,
both of us smiling, suffused with the music,
critical abilities in abeyance
as we followed the crowd into the subway.
Plus, okay, a little high.
Even rats express regret; one can see it
in their brain scans.
I regret I left my college, when I was
almost through, to follow him to the Midwest.
How non-vested with judgment the young are.
Maybe I should have had
that baby, the one I thought I’d have to
carry to work and plunk down
in a cardboard box,
my gamble on perfect behavior.
I regret I stayed with him too long,
because the leaving was hard for me.
How can I reconcile the man who smashed
walls, dishes, broke all my love,
and then when I left, grabbed
all our cash,
with the man who carried
abandoned dogs out of apartments
in the wake of 9-11?
I can’t think about him without
thinking of the counterfactual.
Where is he now and what is his version
of if only?
- Susana H. Case
Illusion
At first, I think I see
a white palace,
in this countryside
of palaces.
Getting closer,
I see it is a strange
arrangement of fuel tanks,
the way far-off fields
of olive trees reveal
themselves to be hackberry.
So many mirages
in the silt,
incandescence in the arid
wind, the light,
like all light,
playing tricks.
- Susana H. Case
Bundling
—a colonial variant of premarital, non-penetrative sex and courtship
How one goes sparking:
night clothes, repose,
fabric sack
in the sweetness
of dark, early-to-bed
husbandry of firewood,
drawstring that closes
the bag the girl
is wrapped in.
Her parents tucked
them in. She lies awake,
listens to his breathing.
Scarcely a word
exchanged, but
conversation is in
the touch. There’s
temptation in the cold,
and that centerboard
which parts them,
unyielding plank.
- Susana H. Case
Straight Hair
I prefer it straight,
the boyfriends always
prattled. Old story.
My friend advised me,
for curly white-girl hair:
Leave it on for less time
than the box instructs.
Lye to wreck
the protein bond, to relax
the coils, hopefully
not break many strands,
though always, filaments
of evidence appeared
in the sink after a rinse.
I could never win that battle,
eyes pink and watery
from the sulfur smell.
When I wasn’t trying
to scare my hair
into a steady course,
I fantasized it
blowing in the wind,
along with the answers
to everything. I was going
for the folksinger look,
as if split ends
made up for how
hopelessly I carried a tune.
- Susana H. Case
Rubber Chicken
At a dinner party
eating awful
chicken I thought
might be soy,
back when I was a sociologist,
I got seated next to
a dentist who put his hand
on my thigh and asked
what I did,
then, waving his knife,
blamed me
for ruining the world.
Who knew I channeled
Loviatar, daughter
of the god of death,
the one who gives birth
to plague, tries to steal
the sun, moon, and stars.
I said, yeah, that’s me,
and I wasn’t even wearing
a low-cut dress.
Now that I write poems,
it’s not only the dentists
that are off-put
at parties, so yes, I confess.
I did it.
I follow in the footsteps
of those who broke
the line
and stanza.
I killed the world.
Destructive bitch—
my middle name.
I’ve been smashing things up
for years.
- Susana H. Case
Meat Chandelier
A Venetian blown glass chandelier,
its sculpted cuts—
Deborah Czeresko’s sausage links,
chops, pinkish kitsch,
no flowered frills.
Calabria Pork Store
on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx
uses real flesh for its phallic
ceiling’s chandelier arms—
like an Australian BBQ
candelabrum bearing three thousand
pounds of low and slow.
And then there’s the sexist slang
for gangbang: meat chandelier.
Bukkake, Japanese for splash,
a pornographic gangbang genre,
gets around heavy censorship
by showing ejaculate, faces,
but no baloney pony.
Why a queer glassmaker
makes a meat chandelier:
salami as feminist. Glass
Czeresko calls the great equalizer.
Her fat-fingered
fuck you to the male blowers.
- Susana H. Case