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November 28, 2024

3 Poems

Rebecca Hawkes

HEART REACT

Symmetry of matching lockscreens.

We laugh out loud like two dogs barking.

Make inane claims like, we could easily

 

enhance this brewpub’s atmosphere

by installing a clear glass vat

with the hot guy from the shape of water

 

suspended golden in the beer. Thumbprint

unlock. Eyes with dollar sign pupils. Tongue

unrolled before me as a set of stairs,

 

heart marching out my mouth

to prance down its red velvet carpet.

Romance is me snapping

 

the necks of two swans

to tie them together in a bow.

My hair fixed with ribbons. You

 

in a pile of dead birds

plucking feathers –

loves me, loves me not, loves me.

 

 

 

 

ANIMAL WRONGS

My yard is overrun with feral hogs.

 

Delusional crushes deflect despair.

 

You’ve got to sniff the arse to know the dog.

 

Somewhere a bird has a nest of my hair.

 

 

New enrichment shipped to my enclosure.

 

Nipples free as songbirds in the spring.

 

Artificial meat in brave new flavors.

 

God forbid women do anything!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

 

WOULD YOU LOVE ME IF I WAS A WORM

      or would I
   still love you if I were
     enwormed / mightn’t I move on
         to mulchier concerns / learn
      even a worm can spurn /
and loosed of my interior
rigidity / my clinking calcium
industry of teeth  / you would surely
      miss the muscles of my mouth / busily
         working the dirt / as I kiss my way down /
                my tapered totality an earthen mirth
         of tastebuds / chemoreceptive ecstasies /
    debauchery beyond sex / entirely unsaddled
from genders / drenched in richest mess
of nectarine pits / the writhing revelry
    of compost / don’t look so bitter /
                 even a worm can yearn /
              given so many hearts / to drive
            my hydraulic astonishment / I’d never
          forget you / promised me / your bones /
    eyeless I would still sense the precision
of your shadow / your fallen soles
quaking the soil / and I’d follow
along below / I would love you
      as only a worm knows / discreet
          and patient / til you join me in the loam /
                murmur dirty / filth fidelity / slow dance
                   in your casket / entwine with passion
            in your sockets / dissolute banquet
   feasting to turn / all your adored softness
into worms / flesh of my flesh / 
sweetmeat / do not squirm /
      darling  / our hatchlings
          will inherit the earth

Rebecca Hawkes is a painter-poet from rural Aotearoa New Zealand. Her first book MEAT LOVERS won Best First International Collection in the UK Poet Laureate's 2022 Laurel Prize and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist for bisexual poetry. She is head shepherd of warm-blooded literary journal Sweet Mammalian and co-edited the Antipodean climate crisis anthology No Other Place to Stand.  In the US her poems have been awarded Salt Hill's Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Palette Poetry's Sappho Prize, with more work published or forthcoming in places like Glass, Cordite, and Gigantic Sequins. Rebecca is currently topsy-turvy between hemispheres studying an MFA in yearning (and, to a lesser extent, poetry) at the University of Michigan. Thus unused to seeing wild mammals that are not enemies of the state, she is endlessly entertained by squirrels.