Movable Type
By Jonathan Sisson
It is not consumption of meat,
the great food-chain waste, that makes one ugly.
Watching apes pelt enemies with dung
may remove the bloom from eating fruit.
Nor is it hair, nor poverty—
though watching an urchin so ill with worms
that they fall from her mouth when she speaks
may remove the bloom from poetry.
“The reason I want my tubes tied,”
the patient tells her gynecologist,
“is no one goes out on a date now
to hear a symphony. They just fuck.”
The gynecologist daydreams
about his emergency physical
performed on a Miss America
with the vapors, on her goodwill tour.
His kindergarten teacher blooms
like a crocus from the linoleum,
and her scent unlocks the labyrinth,
but the children roil up like magma.
He becomes a flower at last,
full of his medical experience.
The thunderous nightmare lights on him
to taste his offering through its legs.
It takes. His everything is drained
into a network of alien need,
and rises by paired baroque organs,
of language, invented for lying.
Credit: The Paris Review
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