Zoe Dzunko
Matanza
Inside of you is the liver.
You swallowed it
with the black cherries,
made a complete
meal of it.
Does the organ
even know, and how
does it recognize itself
in the deadly process.
Does the flesh quiver
at the thought of
more meat.
The dying
that makes the miracles
possible: glory glory.
Eating the fattiest parts
of the animal like
the way you’d let ice
become a river beneath
the heat
of your tongue.
I never owned my body
but I made a home in it
for you sleep like a balled
up calf, freezer burn
brown.
Dig a hole in the red
dirt, lower the carcass
in. I’m just waiting
to receive you.
X
Not everything is a mermaid
that dives into the water,
so I am becoming a fiction.
Once we helped each other
swim and tried to drown
one another at the same time.
My bikini fell to the floor
of the ocean and marked an x;
made a whalebone reanimate
by force of will. On land I leave
fragments of magic for you
to wish upon, my fallen eyelashes
asleep on your pillow, lipstick ring
kisses so you won’t miss the curl
of my tongue. Can we wash me
until my outside grows squeaky tight
again, until I make one leg out
of two? Innocence is a curse:
I just want to comfort everyone
with lipstick on their teeth
and if you brush past me on your
way, I apologize. We sailed
such a long time, only to find
all of the mermaids got their legs.
How am I to beg, and who am I to beg
to?
Indolic
If we waited long enough
we could witness the body
making new parts, growing
new flesh shapes, hungry
like a goldfish to occupy
negative space. Say, please
grow to the plant you killed,
say please rain to desert
skies; nature’s weird trick
is to force division in the
wrong places. The mould
of wet scabs, the sickening
mass of deadly nightshade,
the vines of veins branching
into new blooms on my
calves. So, you want to talk
about flowers, how knots
of nothing remarkable bust
their way to beautiful; how
skies sweat on them at dusk?
Just their slow centerpiece
death, or that they know when
to die? Talk of how the air
grew ripe at the idea of green,
thick with the rot of sunshine.
The ocean spits up the mess,
leaves it on the shore to dry;
the body of soil, warm enough
to grow explosions. Somehow,
your nose imagined sweetmeat
at the sight of a rose, alone—
some seventeen layers of pink
tongues, licking at the inside
of your computer screen,
the menace of beauty, no violets
to shrink into—I am laying out
for the bees, but they never land
when you want them this much.
I’m still holding onto one half of a set of earrings I’ve had since before my ears were pierced: tiny enamel bluebirds in flight. I don’t really like birds that much, and I don’t recall how I came to own them, but I do remember how captivated I was by them as a child. Each night of the school week I would free them from their velvet box and turn them in my palm, watching as the light roused them into a luminous state of animation, longing for the weekend to arrive so that I could finally wear them. Now they just remind me of all the perfect things about childhood—the simplicity and the freedom, the little moments of wonder.
Zoe Dzunko’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, The Age, H_NGM_N, Two Serious Ladies, The Lifted Brow, and Banango Street. She is the author of: All of the Men I Have Never Loved (Dancing Girl Press), Bruise Factory (NAP), and Wet Areas (Maverick Duck Press). She lives and writes in Melbourne, where she is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at Deakin University, and is an Assistant Poetry Editor for Coconut Magazine.