A new poem by Meat Lovers author Rebecca Hawkes.

WILD GEESE BY MARY OLIVER BY HERA LINDSAY BIRD BY REBECCA HAWKES

 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to take relationship advice from migratory birds.

You do not have to listen to anyone

who lays their head in your lap

and begs for forgiveness.

You do not have to fly south with them after this……

then north again next to an empty seat

the unfastened belt coiled beside you

a spent threat

like a roadkill snake

flattened by your dump truck ass reversing……………

beep beep beep

while a perfect V formation of geese is sucked one by one into the jet engines

their soft animal bodies going ponk ponk ponk

like olives being slurped over the lip of a glass vessel.

You do not have to do anything…………………………………………

so I might as well stay on the sticky linoleum floor

and take another sip of olive brine

straight from the jar…………….. as self-care.

 

You do not have to be good if you are prepared work hard

on your fibbing….. “I don’t still love her she is merely a hand waving in the air and I am a theremin…… ooooOOO000OOOOooOOOooooo………

this is supposed to happen……………..”

 

“We are not boning……………………………

we are just partners in the doubles luge………..”

 

“I am not leaving you………. I am taking a temporary break

from the pressures of elected office

to devote more time to my Furby taxidermy Etsy……………………”

 

Mary, do not even tempt me to tell you about my despair…….

mine…… dazzled by the chandeliers of my scintillating mental illnesses

I am compelled to decorate my agonies……… like a caddisfly larva

constructing tubular sarcophagi from gold flecks and seed pearls…………

 

Crikey……… I suffer for poetry

in my wet stretch velvets

and glory in the dubious prestige of my chosen art form.

Poets keep skittering out of the woodwork

yet nobody prepared me for the soft animal of my body

keeping the score……………… with a disproportionate hangover

and a sense that thirty to forty olives was not actually an adequate dinner………………

 

Honestly I could stand to repent a little more.

I am the horrible goose that lives in the town

clanging my mischief bell and demanding to be adored

by those who have already made their disdain palpable…………

Put me on my knees and pour goodness down my gullet until my liver engorges so

you can sample the foie gras of my new worthiness,

spread upon a stale baguette!

 

You do not have to be good, but I’m pretty convinced I do…………….

I uphold a punishing double standard while performing dainty sabotage

like self-help via the medium of birdwatching.

Hera, how can we survive ourselves?

When the ex-girlfriends have returned
to the woods from whence they came,
whoever we are, no matter how lonely

will the world still be foolish enough to offer itself to our imaginations?

A smiling dolphin crests from the waves to greet you

and you stub out a cigarillo in its blowhole………………

 

I swim alone in the ocean after work

when the dog sharks come grazing in the shallows

and all the mothers of the town bring their children to the water’s edge to watch them. The mothers wade in, up to their knees, piggybacking their toddlers, pointing “look, they’re all a family, see the babies? And there’s all the mums and daddies, lots of them, just like our family, and your dad won’t stop being your dad but Jason will be your dad too.”

They are announcing

their place in the family of things.

 

I am swimming back to the pontoon

wondering how long I knew Mary

for her anthems of holiness

before I understood what all those opening flowers were about………….

It’s not enough to just say nature is gay

and I should’ve guessed from all the…………………

environmentalism

that she was the cottagecore lesbian blueprint I’d longed for

that whole lousy winsome time when I thought all I had was poetry

by heterosexuals who were extremely into wisteria……………….

 

A queer child rapturous in unspeakable isolation

scooping tadpoles from the mountain tarn

that morphed into tiny brown frogs so specific to that place

the species had no scientific name,

amphibians smaller than a thumbnail

and no one was there to tell me

the oils from rough-scrubbed hands

could sear through semi-permeable skins,

before the pond was filled in

and nobody would ever commune with the frogs again.

Too late to learn when love means not to touch.

And am I still that blundering thing, that hurts

without meaning to? I didn’t mean to.

Or if I did, I don’t remember it……………………

 

And now love has leapt from my hands like the last and littlest frog

and I am a body inside of a body again, big baby me

aloft in the churning sewer sea, awash

in the derelict infrastructure dregs

of the only city I know how to live in. So what if I

may never be loved again. The world goes on,

the sharks go gentle into their deep evening,

my hair will dry in crunchy waves by the time I walk across the city

and I will not feel beautiful to myself

but I might feel…………… not disinteresting.

A little less crushed by life,

a little more coyly asking life “what’s the PSI on that thang?”

 

Meanwhile my dad’s half-butchered deer

hangs from the tractor’s upraised forks to drain.

 

Meanwhile the undisturbed earthstars

have opened, fat with rain.

 

Meanwhile the wild goose

is spatchcocked on the barbecue.

 

You survive this life until you die of it………………

and Mary Oliver is dead

so get laid while your own body’s warm.

We owe it to the dead to have a smashing time

and joy is the queerest art form of all………………

why else would they have called it gay?

 

Sing it with me ladies………

we could never be wives

 

but we are brides

gay married to amazement……………

 

Let us waste our lives……………

There are so many soft animal bodies

to be loved or bitten by.

 

The Friday Poem is edited by Chris Tse. Submissions are currently closed.