
03-31-2020
​
Kendra DeColo
​
Dirty Talk
“Listen, even a lullaby can bleed” –Osip Mandelstam
​
Say my name like the last bright syllable
of olive in a martini glass, your tongue
an eel deranged with moonlight
squiggling at the bottom of a gasoline-
dark sea. I’ve tested all the condoms,
filled them with champagne, imagined
a tiny house inside the reservoir tip
where unborn children catch fireflies in a wet field,
their fingers pulsing with light
every time we play Pull-Out Roulette
or the latex doesn’t break, a choreography
of blackout and bioluminescence plagiarized
from an oyster’s bristled sheen. Love, we are ancient
as the first people who learned to screw standing up
against a pine tree. Only your murmurs can staunch
the fissures inside me. Touch me like an assassin
strokes the steps of a church. Say my name
until I glow, engorged and radiant
as a tick boasting her blood-swollen
hunger without shame.
To My First
“I should warn you, every guitar has its ghosts”- Patrick Rosal
Slick of muscle
and reverb lifted
from a musky case—
black and white
as a plastic cow’s hide,
udders strapped
with kegs, gold
foam spurting
into drunken mouths—
beneath my delusions
of James Brown
and Little Wing
I played you with neon
in my blood, phosphor
dousing your neck,
a junky’s stammer
and scarlet twitch,
formaldehyde tongue
and red mowhawk
of the boy whose girl
I stole, sweet sticky
kiss, ellipsis
and staggered noon
hunting down
the last tingle
of electric teeth
and gun metal ache,
playing you until
my fingers bled,
until my bones shone.
The Perfect Aura
To have the confidence of a mannequin
stripped and starving on display
is half-way to being human as I am half-
way there most days, remembering
to be thankful for my teeth and good vision,
the taste of grapefruit and a woman’s
full voice singing fuck you
as we pass briefly on the street,
the gift of invisibility granting me
another moment of freedom.
And then there are days when I envy
the plaster limbs poised in store windows,
anemic auras grafted from steel
and artificial starlight, the un-desperateness
to live that will outlast us. My sister
tells me her aura has its own doppelganger,
smart as a radar looping around her inner-
self, her body shining like a car dealership.
She never worries someone will see
through the mesh of shaved metal, the red
halo of her wig. If I had her armor
I would wear it like my favorite station
leaking repeat hits from a boom box,
slow and dangerous as a summer
verging on mayhem, loud enough
to remind every person I pass
that we were once a choreography
of particles glittering in the same
discotheque’s blackout, that says:
I am trying to transmit you
something, to reside in your ether,
not a confession but one long unfolding
salutation, like the sign at White Castle
whose message changes each Sunday
where I’m often stopped at a red light
wishing for someone’s hand
to touch me at the clavicle, to leave
a stain deep enough to last.
​
-from My Dinner with Ron Jeremy, Third Man Books (2016), selected by POW Spring Guest Editor, Luke Johnson
​
KENDRA DECOLO is the author of My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016) and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House Magazine, Waxwing, Los Angeles Review, Bitch Magazine, VIDA, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2019 Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has received awards and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony, Split this Rock, and the Tennessee Arts Commission. She is currently writing a sports comedy and is co-host of the podcast RE/VERB: A Third Man Books Production. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.