A Poem Featured at Iowa Review
How do our identities interact with the inanimate objects we use daily?
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You touch my lips more than my old wife,
but how could I love you? With a red-handle knife
from the shed my Honey painted teal,
should I slice open God,
the natural fabric felt as zephyrs and grass mites,
and kneeling next to my toolbox with the loose latch,
rewire the laws binding Venus and the Higgs boson,
and risk short-circuiting the sun?
You promise a way to move on,
and when I touch you with these coffee-brown gums,
you never speak. I held you
on sands by over-poetrized waves; took you
on ergophobia-spreading commutes; drank you
after early lovemaking with my Sugar.
Heart-attack do us part.
I use you in quietude as I please.
You hold my addiction: without you,
I could not have started what I cannot stop.
And if I hurled you into the bricks I laid,
sent dripping pieces of you air-dancing,
I would sweep you into the trash indifferent.
If the police stopped by at lunch, we’d chat
about Michelangelo or the Miami Dolphins
as Sweetie, salting soup, shrugged off the mess.
See the protruding veins climbing
fingers along brittle bones under
a gold ring?
Of course not.
If I broke you, and sliced skin on your
shards, what came out would be
what can never come out of you.
Faithful cup:
what is not alive
is what I can only destroy.
O.G. Rose lives on a farm, manages a wedding venue named Mead Lake Lodge, operates Frozen Glory Photography, and teaches piano using visuals from the DLG Pattern Method. A finalist for the 2020 UNO Press Lab Prize and 46th Pushcart Nominee, Rose’s creative works appear at The Write Launch, W&M Review, Toho, Broken Pencil, and Poydras Review.
For more, please visit O.G. Rose.com, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and follow us on Instagram and Facebook. An audio reading of this poem can be found here.