6.08 / July 2011

Three Poems

If you don’t eat, how can you love?

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_7/Love.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

They had both lost
so much weight.
His melon shoulders
and rope swing neck
dwindled to boney outlines.
Her summer hips
whittled to the shape
of a wooden spoon.

By October, all that sex
had been skimmed away
like gravy going down a drain.

The day they butchered
the hens, the leaves on the maples
were heavy, erect
and looked like swarms
of hovering vultures.

They tried to use
the bathroom scale
to weigh the meat,
but it was broken
and they couldn’t see
the numbers.


Creation Myth

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_7/Myth.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Brynhilda, mark me like a birch slab,
burn the runes into my clavicle and call me a wooden

idol. You see me sleeping, send me the ice dream.
A brown cow comes to carve out my shapes and crevices-

it feels like being bathed by a woman.
From her slick tongue

my body becomes
eyebrows: the sun melting behind a ridge.
naval: caldera.
left palm: a stretch of frozen prairie.

When I wake up, a white cloud hangs in the air.
I see my breath, I see through it.

It looks like you, Brynhilda. You appear and disappear
in the darkness. You are a ghost visible only in the cold

and when I inhale this vapor, I don’t know if its you coming into my body
or me coming into yours.


What the Beat Said

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_7/Beat.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Tiny says she don’t get down but I saw her
hammin’ up a frat on Sat, red dress double duty
dudes, a couple ladies, whole bunch of spit
shaking when she shook (a dance? a trembling?)

If heaven could have made a fruit betwixt
the dick and pear rose tree, I would have gladly
spent a life in debt and love to dote on thee.
Instead: hey do yeh wanna make out and roll around?

Echoes from this convo: Tight rings of a tree.
or long and ice-wide.
(when) Missy E. go ba bumpa bump bump
(then) Tiny Me. go tha thumpa thump thump

Her mouth like a starburst,
booty twisting like she got it-she do do do do
like the only time Tiny lives
inside her bodies is when she gives it away.


Rebecca Olson holds an MFA in poetry from Oregon State University and is the editor of CALYX Journal. Her work has been published in Word Riot.