The Face

The only and savage human gift is desire
Of fiercest light the double retina
Of a line’s sultriness the tightening skin
Of the calcium orbit some bones
Unfasten from your lips however the crown of death conjured from soil and tears
The corrupt magic honed in vulgar woods
The face in the weeds near the riverbank that with feral intensity
Intercepted my passage along the root path
And like pooled water reflections won’t breach
And like a blank galaxy spreading the sky
And like a bouquet of drowned birds
Stuffed the frictionless air with chasms
Lymph infected

‡

The Face

Face face
Snowblank forsaken face of blight
Promiscuous with brine thorn and bramble
My molars sprout thin electrified rods when
You close the flooded dreamscape to ice drip
Mouth full of blood and iron
Swift metal
Anasthetic flattened gash
Leering from a cleft like the crusted
Frozen head of a dead winter fox
But firm and serene your eyes of zero
Gapped animal vacancy

‡

The Face

Dazed
By immersive spores of your mouth
The campaigns of silence there
And granular pollens of your outer lip
Just once I solicit the suicide check of your gaze
Leaking barium compounds your gaze rotating on
A heated axle of revoked debauchery
Your gaze like an uppercut from the weeds of indigent chemical disease
Where you sprawl and cannot remember that my heritage
Never relinquishes rot
That it saturates the roiling forest
Whose roots suck noisily at the watershed
And whose hidden turbulence doses wellsprings for
The dough your face leavens

‡

The Face

The loose fire of your fever blood
Fills the last flood chamber between us with raw
Mineral roasted fluid alluvium dumped from the intravenous tube
Into the rheum your eyes discharge all around me
Afar the cave of unblemished flesh
Disgorging the mulch of forest bottoms and sluices
Whose silt is laced with the quickrot of rodents
Whose mud you sloughed off your shoulders and neck
When you arose from your lake to enchant me
By the pure vein and warmth of the cave
By the clean scrub of my stomach
By the crystalline pulse of my arteries blazing at night
Rise up that I might again
Sag durably through the melt of your saturated skin

‡

The Face

Flesh cave incandescent and watery
With dripping yarn at the door
Where your eyes slosh toward me in greenish ruts
Where your eyes float like serous fruit decaying
Where your eyes probe at tributaries in my skin folds
Unblemished flesh
Membrane bulging with skewers of rampant fertility
Swallow your menace with the placental powder
I am here I place myself inside your slop for good

‡

The Face

In the cave of unblemished flesh
Your moths thrust past my lips
And dropped eggs fuzzy against my tonsils
I slid them through my intestine and waited
The spent insects vanished into the hole in your milky face
And the flesh swelled close around us

My body wasted its juices
My skin grew slick and I waited
In my intestine the larvae began to unfurl and I felt your tongue
Slurping over my torso but still I waited
I wanted to shed my whole skin
The larvae pulsed and tumbled

My organs released by your tongue rose up
And my skin glowed pallid green
The flesh cave wildly dilated and doused us in mucus
All at once I puked up heavy bile
And my organs splashed across the flesh floor
I picked them up and stuffed them into
Your slack and torpid mouth
The larvae sprouted through my skin
And thinking I’d gone too far
I fell asleep

‡

The Face

I stop to root up something living
A gristle swells in the bulge and I grow panicky
Near translucent eggs at night
The larvae mature in my sternum
Like a sac of fluid my abdomen enlarges
To one side then the other and I lurch on the path
The squirrel has human hands
The raven a woman’s mouth
I can’t return to the flesh cave until you’ve gone out searching
Under this skin of snow beneath these root tendons
A living creature wriggles in loosening soil

: : : : :

ANDY STALLINGS lives in Massachusetts with his family, and teaches at Deerfield Academy. His first book of poems, To the Heart of the World, came out with Rescue Press in 2014. Other new poems are forthcoming in Matter and February: An Anthology.