ANN PEDONE
Strings 2
‘about lighthouses not having to move to save a ship’
September 2024
from While Marie
The obscene weather of this room
Smell of hottest antifreeze coming up from the radiators
“If only I were able to take even the
smallest bit of pleasure in the sperm still clinging to the
sides of the bathroom sink”
I’m thinking, what it takes just to survive the
meatiness of the body
His hands are doing nothing, but startled
He looks at me. I try not to get my face wet
And instead get down on my knees and make
a list of demands. I get down on my
knees and blow him a hundred and thirty seven times
Am I the object of this?
Then I wait for the reddest facts, bent almost telling
“Of course, the Greeks had their gods. Although
most suffered terrible bouts of nausea, only some of
which has ever been accurately diagnosed”
For the last three months I haven’t been
able to “subject-verb-object” unless I picture
myself shoplifting
Question: What do you call a body that no longer
sees the need for ventriloquism?
Answer: Parataxis, or the careful placement of one man’s
chandelier beside another man’s
The crows on the garbage bins giving each other
faulty syntax, I’m bound by what
Plato said about poetry, that it’s always a mistake
That I sat down naked
That I had bought ten pounds of duck fat
That I had been caught on the other side
Of the checkpoint and forced to
Trade my mother tongue for “Head of Deer”
That I’ve made a list of twelve dead husbands
That it’s possible to maintain an empire of a thousand
Years on nothing but freshgoatmeat
That yesterday I bought a horsehair sofa from
A man who desperately wanted narrative to be
“Even the tenderest body only has one mouth”
That I then found my way home, and for the
Afternoon stewed in my own piss until the
Cumquat, the tangerine, the bruised melon
ANN PEDONE’s recent books include The Medea Notebooks (Etruscan Press), and The Italian Professor’s Wife (Press 53) Her poetry, non-fiction, and reviews have recently appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Posit, Texas Review, ANMLY, and The American Journal of Poetry. Ann is the founder and editor-in-chief of the journal and small press, αntiphony.
