Three Poems By Melissa Broder

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Waterfall

The most romantic thing a human being can say
to another human being is Let me help you vomit.
No human being has ever said this to me
& I keep going to god too clean as though god
is frightened of muddy feet. If I am missing
a hairpin I don’t go at all. Please describe
your vomiting; it is like a psalm for me
a place where wilderness might be new.
Other people’s dirt makes a lovely frock.
Grant I be forgiven in the gush.

Megachurch

The altar boys want me
Swooning drunk
They say If you feel like nonsense
Get nonsenser
If you feel bananas
Make a sundae already

Oh I do
I want holiness to meet me halfway
Meet me easy
Like a tugboat on glitter water
Hotel music
Ultra gloss

So easy to fall in the water
How easy these altar boys come on
Bodies of soap
With pinwheel erections
They eat hamburgers effortlessly
Only some have hips

It is movie night
In their church in America
A crucifixion movie
No a movie about love
They offer me megaCokes
With rum

Rum will make the movie
More romantic
I cannot say
I am undrunk
How I got to be undrunk
Not here

Boredom
Is going to get crucified here
The whole church is beeping
Glitter water glitter rum
Even my nail polish
Beeping.

Steak Night

In husbandland I am made
of hamburger, eggs and potatoes

a food brew really
scraps spackled.

A kitchen swells around
full of cakes and clocks

and babydolls not like ham.
A hash has happened

the husband is absent
my marriage dress hangs

by the stove.
I put me in my mouth

to taste patty melts
stripey fats and underblood

juicy dregs for geraniums.
I could let drops

and grow victory gardens
might I cleave a piece to suck?

O the eggs are growing old
or else they’re growing lungs.

Melissa Broder is the author of two collections of poems: Meat Heart (forthcoming from Publishing Genius in 2012) and When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother (Ampersand 2010). Poems appear or are forthcoming in Guernica, Redivider, Barrelhouse, Opium magazine, et al. She edits La Petite Zine and curates the Polestar Poetry Series at Cake Shop.

For more poetry, visit The Poetry Section’s vast archive. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.