Three Poems
by Nicolette Wong
To Call This Honest House
To call this honest house, spill dark sand
over its failings. Torque the warbling
caution I would have swallowed
more graciously than he circles our lives.
Everywhere the image scrawls a lasso
in search of answers. Nothing blots the night;
our bodies cast shadows on what façade
has cast itself and crooned our sleep.
End of culprit—enormity soils my glee
outside the door. Somewhere, a defiant god
spits the tepid for the molten, scalds
my name to cook a fog death.
Celebration
Going to my next life to sell sprinklers
and tango to the musicians of Jacob.
Where are jokers and hoaxers
as the statue in chain, a green rupture
from the holy land—treacherous,
with the voice of an origami shredded
for early celebration. We drink
the tinkling, the improbable census
of time. A foothold, cooed
by the flurry or the sack.
On the sauté border: a bridge,
cars branded with last night’s lava
from unfinished permutations. That wants
to skew my ammunition, center of dome.
The door will not bend to the shine
of bandoneon, bleached
on my bright day. It must come
with an extinguisher at his side.
He might then—an alliance—
swallow the voice in its wake.
The Arsonists
We make the mistake of clipping moss to our throats. Burgundy: a god flexing its temporal eye for a mile. Contradictory, like a forked violin, spiking melodic concussion down the highway. We choke corals from the dusk. There are traces of bats that have pierced our flowers; of caviar, swept from a musket; of a day on hopscotch and this prescience of revolting. The nights paint an insinuated halo. Tuck at the bell and the posts will fall. Tuck at the hula in the gut, our marriage is felled.
Nicolette Wong is a magician, dancer, and editor in chief of A-Minor
Magazine & Press. She blogs at Meditations in an Emergency.
