Angelica Vaccaro
Every night a god
damn
wolf.
Every corridor a god
damn
wolf.
How my bloodied and beguiled body sweats and smolders under the heat,
and the heat,
and the heat.
Ten or two miles away, either way, I’m away,
and you are awakened.
That keen and tactful sense of smell shakes you from your softened slumber,
dancing and dilating pupils reflect the sky and you are hunger,
with an energy you’ve allowed to crystallize in your charred lungs.
The rocks and the rocks and the rocks, how you’d crumble and stammer for
those precious pebbles –
Your dear and queer measures in your search in your thirst
for my ivory and shapeable skin,
pomegranate blood clots falling loosely from the periphery of your crow.
Every night a goddamn wolf.
Do I taste like magnetism and metal?
You are three dollar bottles of whiskey and a crystal ship
(the chemicals, the chemicals, the chemicals –
can you taste them now? Are you full sail?)
Mother, why is it always a Libra?
A braggart with a boastful stomach and a sickening hide,
strutting, a silverback rife with power (I was thrown over shoulders, over moons, I was thrown.)
You weren’t easy with your unshorn hands and lasso tongue,
I never knew fear so great. I was fucking crazy, you told me so. You told me so.
Every night a goddamn wolf.
Drowning in witch hazel, drowning in coca dreams and fever-fits,
padlocked in linoleum rooms, the scent of shit and bleach permeating,
I often flirted with a rusted razor blade inside those walls –
How she raged, how she wanted me! Her cool and violent edges,
her cool and violent edges…
I was a sorrowful sonnet sobbing sweetly on a sunlit stream,
until the night fell, and the sky fell,
and it was all of your darkness at once, at once, at your command. And wasn’t I crazy?
Every moon fall a goddamn wolf.
***
Angelica Vaccaro is an emerging poet and essayist who lives and works in Metro Detroit, and has been writing for over two decades.