3 by debora kuan
PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN WITH A HOAGIE
I want to drown in six pounds of macaroni salad.
The groans of Superbowl Sunday. The cries of triumph. I want hoagies unfurled from cold foil. They’re called hoagies where I come from. O beautiful possibilities like second-base in a parked car in the half-full lot outside a movie cineplex, the neon glinting off your corneas. When God closes one door, somewhere He opens a hoagie and jams that football mouth with thinly sliced ham and honey roast turkey, roast beef, cheese, pickles, and shredded lettuce. Paper hoagie covers rock hoagie! Melted cheddar covers everything. |
TEEN MAMMAL
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The whale dons
her psychological blubber and it tastes so seal. She wants to stay huge in another man's harbor. I don't blame her. I yearn to float more too in lamb fat, to run my tongue over other lovers and the glory of their molars! They're sharp over there, there in the clover where science grows a moral four inches tall and we ourselves bear the sex consequence of crop circles in our hair. |
THE BEST INDIE SEX SCENE
In outer space all sex is an imitation of a sex scene in a movie. All the armchairs are a blue moiré that smells like future. My future: a distinction between the leaf and the tree, or the the meaning of the leaf and the meaning of the tree. The child in the tree wants the biggest brass instrument she can hold and so she chooses the tuba. She has made her own head from a chunk of sidewalk and wrapped it in yarn. It is not evening at all in the town I think of as home. We celebrate at noon and we shall celebrate all noons. By twilight I see your bloated body in the menacing clouds. I see all the dogs who suffer cruelly from worms. People bring their lawn chairs. They eat prescient chicken from heavy baskets. These are the people we come from. We come from everything here, even the things that bar us entry. The string of lights across the boats, the masts waving fluently like Portuguese. The breeze is its own flute and its own arrested jazz. You can feel the excitement. How excited the sea is, knowing we are here. We are white moles following other white moles. We are on our planet, creeping the ground like moles who are singing. We are riding our planet by singing. |
DEBORA KUAN is the author of XING. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Awl, HTMLGiant, and Gigantic. She is a senior editor at Brooklyn Arts Press and a director at the College Board, and has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and Macdowell.
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