Poetry: Selections from Mary Paulson

Scorn

I write YOU SUCK in scarlet lipstick—

the brilliant letters

mar your perfect beige

living room wall. Moving on

 

I scribble ASSHOLE and LIAR

above your new plasma TV and later,

MOTHERFUCKER across the hood

of your pretty, silver BMW.

 

I separated all 1,800 of your favorite

LPs from their jackets and reassigned them

according to the spectrum of visible light

cross-referenced by my mood, currently

 

RED. Red like the heart

I leave on the kitchen wood block to

bleed and beat. Red

as the apple I bite from your cheek.

 

I can’t say I didn’t know it was coming—

you were cheating someone else when you

first kissed me. I plead

temporary ardor aggravated

 

by willful blindness. I wanted to be

better, special. You proved me INEFFECTUAL,

STUPID, the SAME. It may well be

nobody’s fault, but I just

 

laid out multiple strings of red

Christmas lights to blink DICK

then HEAD in alternate rhythm

across your front lawn.

Art Theory

(with apologies to Mom, an Art History major)

 

Salvador Dali had a dream of Picasso’s head.

It sat in a square within a northward-pointing triangle

that was slowly receding until all that was left

was a liquid blue eye, the size of a child’s fist. The eye

 

(i.e., Picasso) glared at him sternly

and demanded that Dali stop insisting he was Arab

and focus instead on the effect of natural light

juxtaposed with his (Dali’s) sexual urges. Outside

 

a great racket had begun by a gang of tiny dots

appareled in hues of salted blues—

aquamarine, turquoise, slate and lavender, midnight shale—

each elbowing for position in a great, group portrait. At once

 

moving and merging under a sun-white streetlight,

they agreed at last on a single landscape of daytime sky as viewed

from the TGV returning to Paris from Nancy

then added, at the last minute, a bowler hat

 

floating on a cloud. The hat birthed a thought in a balloon

alongside a cool squiggle of pipe. Not just any pipe,

une pipe, held by a Thinker accustomed to staring into space.

He rested his jaw on one hand, the pipe in the other and

 

while wondering when he would conclude his very long thought

and while puffing on a pipe that was not, after all, a pipe

he was chagrined to find himself turning to stone right in front of the Mona Lisa who almost grinned.

Trouble with the Moon

Don’t know what to do

about the moon

this night—

it’s shine too white, glare

too bright and

I can’t see the stars

as I’d like. Even the sea is shocked

into stillness,

encased

in solid silver. I feel

stripped, there’s nowhere

to hide—

the moon is always there, staring,

interrogating.

It’s like being tied to a chair, tortured

by air, one big hairy eye

issuing a dare—

to answer the question, spill

the beans but I’ve got nothing, nothing

to share.

Rage at the moon!

And all its disconcerting flair.

I shake my fist at the moon.

Stop looking at me! I say out loud, feeling

swiftly stupid and

kowtowed.  Head bowed,

I shuffle inside

to find my understanding cat.

Yes

when the floors tilt and I feel like a slinky shaping

along, mechanically sloping on

down the stairs—

when my body de-stiches, expands like a fog or

pulls in tight like the musty rolled leaves

of a cigar around a dark passage—

 

when I see the jagged painted faces in

a Picasso, eyes and noses detached, sent

apart from one another,

his bone strung mistress like a marionette—

when my mind strays from

itself, cerebellum and stem at odds, the brain 

of higher vertebrae today

rebelling, will tomorrow cajole—

 

when ligaments thrum in my legs like guitar

strings, nightlight neurons click

on, vibrate pink, effervesce green—

when, on the wind, sudden scents take

me places, displace me—

I live my life at turns, wanting to fall apart

unanimously or despairing

to find a way to keep myself together—

 

This body is an appendage and its skin, a curious

suit that morphs in ways I never

agreed to. Most things happen

without my permission. I read about a woman

who had ten people stuffed into her

one head and thought, yes.

 

There are hats without heads floating

in Magritte skies, faces without faces caught

in a photographic moment, strung out

on an 8x10 frame or

loose elsewhere on the street—

For Me

it becomes operatic in swift

escalation, a convocation of voice

an earthquake of earthquake

birthing a canyon—

every gash and fissure, every interstice

of body crowded by crescendo—

 

I swell and split like a fig.

I’ve timed it wrong though. Popped my cork straight

through the ceiling.

Lost my head.

Left him to whisper, pant, sweat over the body

I’ve already let go.

Mary Paulson’s writing has appeared in multiple publications, most recently in Thimble Lit Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Metaworker, Months to Years, Chronogram, Pine Hills Review, Backchannels and Discretionary Love. Her debut chapbook, Paint the Window Open was published by Kelsay Publishing in 2021.