from “taupe house”
Olivia Cronk
Underneath you you can feel it all going
just crazy with vines and intimacy’s misshapen secret sister biting
•
And now I am simply screaming it in my song screaming out on the stage:
. . . . I wore my fur coat to your bedroom.
. . . . I wore my fur coat through the turnstile.
. . . . I left my fur coat on your bed.
. . . . I saw the baby’s head.
. . . . I saw the night in fur.
•
In taupe house
there are gigantic black tear drops
squirreling the ceiling
in taupe house
in each one
with the face of
gigantic black tear drops
bitterly the face of
over and over again in taupe house
in that sweet ass skin
you must know now how I bitterly and now
slippery
little edge luscious
chewed hair in the
in the window’s crystal, mirror to mirror, bloody mouth to bloody mouth
“taupe house” is a long poem forthcoming in Olivia Cronk’s next book, Louise and Louise and Louise, which will be published by the Lettered Streets Press in 2016.
Olivia Cronk’s first book was Skin Horse (Action Books, 2012). Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, Deluge, Dusie, Jubilat, Newfound, Noo Weekly, Spolia, Swine, and Tender; some of her poems will be anthologized in the forthcoming Electric Gurlesque. She coedits the Journal Petra (thejournalpetra.com) with Philip Sorenson, tweets at @InterroPorn, and is an instructor of Composition and Creative Writing at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, IL.
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