from: The Greenland

art by Stephanie Ann Farra

by Ann Pedone

It’s only when we choose
to move through the poem
as we move through the cunt. And I
raise my glass
Invested but sure, but sure, was
scriven, an unplanned
pregnancy, who is the
true mother of my damage

I mean no, I said, and my unusually
clean scalp, the pile of teeth
over by the back
door, I had a dream of erotic

Distinctions last night, prefacing
my translation from the
original Greek

Circa, circa, circa
I have cotton in my ears and up in my crotch, An unmade
bed, which has already been repeated twice. Let’s that
is continent, let’s that is all the hormonal things, let’s
it digests, let’s it mounts, let’s it is the one true speaker of the thing

am making ruins of it

I am making arousal in animals, in linoleum

Move no myth, or vaudeville, and after the
third or fourth full day of doing it, the vast
armada of your scrotum
I might just be making a matrimony of it

As if this were famine music

As if coming at me full frontal was ever
going to be its own “underwater sound”

Teaspoon, not wireless, not the true etymology of
my cervix, or be like plastered

So many old photos
of small dicks, some are even
walking into the room as we speak

I have no identifiable bite marks, but
a small and tidy salted plate of
mackerel, a bit of cheese
goat’s milk you drank maybe ten years later

That there is memory
which has nothing to do
with the body, vaginated
in the shape and oh
so perfect ragtime of speech

Back when we were
both a little bit less
ugly, or sex
is the absolute last thing I would
ever argue is pre-linguistic

And yet, either way the anuses will be brought to justice

Because aluminum, because blistering skin, because when I was
underneath you, trying to say something ////

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