PRIME OR DIAL
[PRY MORE DEE UH]
we’d harvest your names
at the organ swap orgy to play with
your spleen for maw’s left ventricle
mound of venus for heel
same diff
YOU
my friend my my
walking bucket
of scar tissue you
my my. blessure blessure
blesses YOU
‘ve littered the mantle with scare tissue
scar tactics
trickle trickle
ash dust
to drag a finger through we
make trace
spell out
<<TONGUELICKS>>
limp slip
slime tip
in the hand
in your hand we
grip melt
fish bulge
we flinch at french tonguing
we flinch from bruise crush
this melts we
our uh uh uhhh
bio loom in essence
sweetsweet precious please
pleases word sweep
tins from the yard jangling bird wings in them
are you crushed yet
sweepsweep our merry limbs into
our dainty trash heap still
five hundred
years old still
maw’s lost boy still maw lost
by the rubbly dragoons filching tiny cakes from the skull bowl
maw in her room with her twitchy lamp back
and fro back and fro maw her teeter so quiet
teeter in the lids teeter in the thumbs
gone rickety from the teeter teeter O
O O O
O O
O if i lost her
if she got
lost again
her little hairs
her paperskin
crinkled against the edge n blustering coagulant maroons
my fingers glissando ing in its everywhichwhere
such paper gram-
maw
how!
my fingers taking on her her
her deep red
my fingers prove stilt
steadfasted
O! O O
O O
O!
crumples clean our maw
DON’T SHE DON’T
the chairback grown in
-to stammer rash im pression
in prescient
dream milk
our teats milk-empty
but his O. O. O. his teat doth overfloweth
over flower his the sprite in milkwhite decay
treble cleft ed
hare lippish frons
his maw
maw curdling the tongues he keeps saturate
ferment in his firm uh meant
uh mint
drink to it!
drink drink!
drink til wet
til face splash
my precious stone
Patricia Hartland reading PRIME OR DIAL [PRY MORE DEE UH]
Patricia Hartland is learning about poems at Notre Dame and enjoys translating works that insinuate themselves into bendable tongue-borders. Recent samplings can be found with Two Lines, Asymptote, Lunch Ticket, Duende, and are soon to come with BrooklynRail, World Literature Today, and Elsewhere.