Zoe Dzunko
CACOLOGY
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She will break hearts
some day. These words spill with an innocuous grace and in them we rejoice. Here I am in my jumpsuit with its shrub-spotted savannahs, the blunt claws of apex predators and their ragged stripes. This from the man in the mall, making immortal my second of childhood. His pastel powdered hands turning the face dusty and lightly seraphic, a little sepia memory before the future hits it. Already, I am momentous. He has drawn me this way. Not exactly pivotal, but stitched into time and its bodily passages. That is what he catalyzes with those very words, this man. I am four years old. Already, I am a body on hold. I sit with the promise of a balloon artist within me, memorizing the shape I would later demand. Poodle, I imagine. Pink, I would respond. |
PEDAGOGY
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The way he did it was by promising revelation.
I moved backwards like a lineage executing itself, my spine boning the coiled wire. He was wrong. It was not at all reminiscent of a long-divided body reformed, as much as it was two halves being jimmied haphazardly apart. I hurried to my after-school job inside the dusty hollow of a strip mall, my burgundy culottes and my shitty hat. Drained a can of Diet Coke before the hour turned, rolling the silver rind in my new hands. The pliable skin of former density, no longer redolent of a thirst recently quenched, as it was of the lacunal gap learning its new state of empty tinny with the sound of it. The day ticked itself forward and in my split mind the sense of moment after a diet is prematurely broken: the flesh betraying itself for itself. I had nothing else with which to compare, save for the memory of my discipline. There are no lessons, my body circles its context. I was something before this. A bright little miracle. |
PREFIX
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The boys of my youth wanted me
Inside chained to the black box The VCR and its endless scroll Of trashy college comedies bloated With swimming pools and empty Reds floating their flimsy surfaces Everybody gets the girl in the end That is the twist of masculine idealism It being denser than submission Wait them out and the women will Eventually crumble as the world Outside carried on without me They would make their demands In tidy orders: an end of the evening Phone call notifying them of my solitude Pacing alone in my bedroom a little Dove lowering its wings to quietly perch A delicate flower pulling its buds in A pink ribbon rolling itself into one Glossy spool of untouchable surfaces With the soft mass of pillow puffed Against my cheek I would press a palm To calibrate my heat I would swallow Against my will the phrase beauty Sleep beauty sleep like many homely Mammals counted but I was never tired With the gape of boredom and its matte Dentalium currencies with their restless Prickling of my limbs I don’t want to Be delicate I would tell the dark room But this is what you make me. |
EFFIGY
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It is true I’ll see her everywhere
That girl I used to breathe Inside outside look at these two Delicate angels walking their dogs Along the footpath freshly plucked From the palms of their mothers’ Active wear hugging them closely And their knees still archetypal They resolutely bone-like We wear our age like masks of fallen Snow succumbing to the soft transition Towards an inevitable bemiring That is my direction I trudge it A long white bow a lonely ribbon Tangled in my hair he later confessed To having witnessed me walking Along the street pushing nothing In front of me but my body Recognisably robbed of all adolescent Affectations in public domain Are the mantle I lap over myself Like a wave safe keeping its sand Aware of you watching I wonder Upon which street did I walk visibly Imperceptive I must have been On Asbury or Main but my mind Autopilots like a camera zoomed in On its very vessel imagines how today Is at once the oldest you have ever been And the youngest you will ever again Be grateful and enjoy the body You have while you still have it Before dying a woman told me this While it felt nothing short of total In its momentousness it proved quieting Of nothing these aches still make The nightly visit waking and trailing me To morning where I rise roused like a hip Bone pressing firm against the casket Of skin you may ask me whatever You need to be willing to hear My truth does it hurt you that no Part of this body arranges itself For your eyes heavy with gaze At night I crawl from the sheath of myself Light a candle in my honour It throwing the scent of fresh flesh What I mean is scented like powder And honey with the slightest redolence Of spit I hunger only for my hunger For my own spaces purple deep There where the ember in me fumes To return to the rib of itself renunciative Of whatever deigns to conceal it It is all I am and it is all I ever was. |
ZOE DZUNKO is the author of four chapbooks, most recently SELFLESS (TAR, 2016). She is the Poetry Editor of The Lifted Brow and in 2014 founded Powder Keg Magazine, an online poetry quarterly, with Sarah Jean Grimm. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House (The Open Bar), Guernica, Australian Book Review, Prelude, The Fanzine et al. She is online at: zoedzunko.tumblr.com
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