BENJAMIN PÉRETWink
Parakeets fly through my head when I see you in profile
and the greasy sky streaks with blue flashes
tracing your name in all directions
Rosa coi√ed with a black tribe standing in rows on the stairs
where women’s pointed breasts look out through men’s eyes
Today I look out through your hair
Rosa of morning opal
and I wake through your sight
Rosa of armour
I think through your exploding breasts
Rosa of a pool the frogs turn green
and I sleep in your navel of Caspian sea
Rosa of honeysuckle in the general strike
and I’m lost in your milky way shoulders the comets made fecund
Rosa of jasmine in the night of washing
Rosa of haunted house
Rosa of black forest filled with blue and green stamps
Rose of kite over a vacant lot where children are fighting
Rose of cigar smoke
Rose of seafoam made crystal
Rosa
—mary ann caws
Where Are You
I would speak to you cracked crystal howling like a dog on a night of flailing
sheets
like a dismasted boat the foam begins to invade
where the cat meows because all the rats have left
I would speak to you like a tree uprooted by the storm
which so shook the telegraph wires
they seem a brush for mountains resembling a tiger’s lower jaw
tearing me apart slowly noisily like a battered-in door
I would speak to you like a metro train broken down at the entrance
of a station I enter with a splinter in my toe like a bird in a vineyard
which will yield no more wine than a barricaded street
where I wander like a wig in a fireplace
which hasn’t heated anything so long