Anne Marie Rooney

In the moonly bookstore I went
towards sex started piling totems
to pleasure in my green produce
basket then a woman spit in
a man's face and an elaborate dance
of abjection water and consent
began when it ended it was all
I could consider the bubbles
that mounted and lifted
the woman a wet glam raft
I put everything back all
the zines and sterile testers

A liquid scope, a death
trap does beknight
the swollen fluted
year. Fog dyes the coast
in birds, little bugs
that root their eating
from a mold. Like the leaf
that ravels towards
light, I too nerve out
across the bilge, open mesh to let
and let steam. Night scares up
the charge the paint
takes: tape to a wound, a smudge
where a lung should be.

I understand the solid way
of man moving over sand. Cast between
rope and rock, the gruesome fact
acquits the stoic, the staid
and beguiling, the switch. Never did I
yearn. Never little cat, like an ambulance
shook. On Thursday I spray fig so fig
becomes the cloud my breast becomes.
A knot. An inked apart stone. Rust
was after what was after forgiveness, but still
I answered, frivolous in the note.

Anne Marie Rooney is a poet and artist living in Baltimore. She is the author of No Beautiful and Spitshine, both from Carnegie Mellon University Press, as well as two chapbooks. Her poetry has been the recipient of the Iowa Review Award, the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, and others.