Four Poems
by Kasey Perkins
Peristalsis
In the dream a strange
ephemeral someone
keeps peeling back my fingers
like the leaves of a persimmon
and leaving sharp
hard objects in the meat
of my palm.
She forces me to open
my mouth and eat scrap metal.
The first is a fish hook
I bend the sharp in on itself
carefully trying
to create a steel pill
smooth edges
something that won’t puncture
my esophagus like so many
wide terror mouthed trout
the barb tickles
on the way down
like hair brushing
my shoulder blades.
Next is a silver coil.
This one is easy
it slides cold down the throat
an accidentally swallowed
ice cube
a screw
and I’m pleading now
since they neither fold
nor dull
She makes me
I can’t stop pulling
my own mouth open
and force gorging
her silent force at the periphery
of my vision egging me on
selecting new tidbits
for the collection.
A staple, the back to an earring
the metal tube that binds
eraser to pencil
small washers
a rusty triple A battery
my esophagus a burning
trash compactor.
My guts are the insides
of a shaken up analog clock
the contents
of a junk drawer.
The Second Chance
(for A.C.)
in the observing afterlife
the college student has fired
himself into the sky
leaving a crepuscular vacuum
in his wake
air left behind
a door shut
an intake of breath
this is it
he is no longer he
he is not hard Cyrillic
rather the luxurious curve
a mathematical derivative
this is it
they are
the unruly bars
of industrial metal
riffing guitars
sheet music of rain
drenching Mars
this is it
the softest she has ever felt
precipitation pearls at her new throat
collarbone ringed
with Capricorn stars
the crones are here
they press her to their galaxies
a blackness finer
than cashmere
hush now new daughter
this is it this is it this is it
the last time she saw you
the one with the red hair pleaded
this is the second chance you deserve
The Oven
for Sylvia Plath
I.
My fingers crawl across
the cool sides
it’s a Belling
brown
or perhaps a Frigidaire
no one will know
or care
about corporate branding
here
it’s 1963: London
and it’s cold
I don’t want to
burn, but sleep.
II.
It’s painful
the steel wool clenched
tightly in my hands
like a clutch of
razor blade pubic hair
my nails bite back
and I scrub
it’s a Viking
black
which is fun
and makes me look
accomplished
at house parties
but for now
I’m scrubbing at the cremains
of a $2.89 Aldi pizza
thinking about what I’ve done
to my babies.
III.
The remnants of a Sunday
roast—beef, potatoes
something for the kids
it smells like meat
and gas
which I’ve just turned on—
gas not always being
my secret ingredient—
I am the meat.
IV.
I’ve removed the racks
the better to fit my body
like a Sunday chicken
scrape scraping
my claws against the walls
picking at the crisped bits
something to
clutch at
to catch against my
fistful of hard wires
my arms tired
the air thick, acrid smells
accosting my nostrils
vinegar, my solvent
inside the oven
inside my veins
something for the kids—
nontoxic
crunchy mom things.
V.
I turn and burn
I melt with a shriek
I am the meat.
VI.
how could he
how could he
how could he
and me
having conjured children
with him
like conjuring the clouds
of baking soda
that fill the Viking
these Valhalla clouds—
stupid, viral
chemical free cleaning
yet chemical reactions bubble still
like a gas line
through my insides.
I too am stupid and viral.
VII.
a cake of soap
a Cuban restaurant coupon
a gold filling
a tender Britishism, like “love”
a wedding ring
a gas knob:
when your husband has an affair,
stick your head in the oven.
The Oven Pt. 2
she sends me reeling back there each week
flooding industrial oil remover flooding
over vinegar in the oven over and over she sends me
the steel wool rips through my flesh
fresh blood bubbling into baking soda pink each week
pink like slow budding agony a peony opening
powder flecked with blackened ash
and what are you thinking inside the oven
she asks every week and my blood leaks from her mouth
from her questions and the metal shrieks against
metal she sends me and I know I’m damaging a ten thousand
dollar appliance and how are you feeling about that exactly
each week we take this peek inside the oven and
something in me cracks it’s just as filthy just as white pink
red black vinegar and solvent and shredded ash and she asks
and now where is the pain on a scale of one to ten
peonies I want to say pink peonies pale again and again
oil and acid and flecks of hot wire eight maybe nine
liar all those peonies completely mine unseen she sends me
and every single week it somehow never gets clean
BIO: Kasey Perkins is a professor, freelance editor, and writer who completed her MFA in poetry in 2014. Her chapbook, When the Dead Get Mail, was released through Finishing Line Press in 2019. Overall, her poetry and poetry book reviews have appeared in the Chattahoochee Review, Chariton Review, Digital Americana, Green Hills Literary Lantern, the Wisconsin Review, the Oracle, Lumina, and many more. She currently teaches first year writing, foodways courses, and medical humanities poetry courses at Washington University in St. Louis.