ADDONIZIO, Kim

Like That

Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road late at night, with no

moon and no town anywhere

and a large hungry animal moving heavily through the brush in

the ditch.

Love me with a blindfold over your eyes and the sound of rusty

water

blurting from the faucet in the kitchen, leaking down through

the floorboards to hot cement. Do it without asking,

without wondering or thinking anything, while the machinery’s

shut down and the watchman’s slumped asleep before his small TV

showing the empty garage, the deserted hallways, while the thieves

slice through

the fence with steel clippers. Love me when you can’t find

a decent restaurant open anywhere, when you’re alone in a glaring

diner

with two nuns arguing in the back booth, when your eggs are

greasy

and your hash browns underdone. Snick the buttons off the front

of my dress

and toss them one by one into the pond where carp lurk just

beneath the surface,

their cold fins waving. Love me on the hood of a truck no one’s

driven

in years, sunk to its fenders in weeds and dead sunflowers;

and in the lilies, your mouth on my white throat, while turtles

drag

their bellies through slick mud, through the footprints of coots and

ducks.

Do it when no one’s looking, when the riots begin and the planes

open up,

when the bus leaps the curb and the driver hits the brakes and the

pedal sinks to the floor,

while someone hurls a plate against the wall and picks up another,

love me like a freezing shot of vodka, like pure agave, love me

when you’re lonely, when we’re both too tired to speak, when you

don’t believe

in anything, listen, there isn’t anything, it doesn’t matter; lie down

with me and close your eyes, the road curves here, I’m cranking up

the radio

and we’re going, we won’t turn back as long as you love me,

as long as you keep on doing it exactly like that.


Muse

When I walk in,

men buy me drinks before I even reach the bar.

They fall in love with me after one night,

even if we never touch.

I tell you I’ve got this shit down to a science.

They sweat with my memory,

alone in cheap rooms they listen

to moans through the wall

and wonder if that’s me,

letting out a scream as the train whines by.

But I’m already two states away, lying with a boy

I let drink rain from the pulse at my throat.

No one leaves me, I’m the one that chooses.

I show up like money on the sidewalk.

Listen, baby. Those are my high heels dangling from the

phone wire.

I’m the crow flapping down,

that’s my back slip

you catch sight of when the pain

twists into you so deep

you have to close your eyes and weep like a goddamned

woman.


My Heart

That Mississippi chicken shack.

That initial-scarred tabletop,

that tiny little dance floor to the left of the band.

That kiosk at the mall selling caramels and kitsch.

That tollbooth with its white-plastic-gloved worker

handing you your change.

That phone booth with the receiver ripped out.

That dressing room in the fetish boutique,

those curtains and mirrors.

That funhouse, that horror, that soundtrack of screams.

That putti-filled heaven raining gilt from the ceiling.

That haven for truckers, that bottomless cup.

That biome. That wilderness preserve.

That landing strip with no runway lights

where you are aiming your plane,

imagining a voice in the tower,

imagining a tower.


What Do Women Want?

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

First Poem for You

I like to touch your tattoos in complete

darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of

where they are, know by heart the neat

lines of lightning pulsing just above

your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue

swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent

twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you

to me, taking you until we’re spent

and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss

the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until

you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists

or turns to pain between us, they will still

be there. Such permanence is terrifying.

So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.

Kisses

All the kisses I’ve ever been given, today I feel them on my mouth,

And my knees feel them, the reckless ones placed there

through the holes in my jeans while I sat on a car hood

or a broken sofa in somebody’s basement, stoned, the way I was

in those days, still amazed that boys and even men would want to

lower their beautiful heads like horses drinking from a river and taste me.

The back of my neck feels them, my hair swept aside to expose my nape,

and my breasts tingle the way they did when my milk came in after the birth,

when I was swollen, and sleepless, and my daughter fed and fed until I pried

her from me and laid her in her crib. Even the chaste kisses that brushed

my cheeks, the fatherly ones on my forehead, I feel them rising up from underneath

the skin of the past, a delicate, roseate rash; and the ravishing ones, God,

I think of them and the filaments in my brain start buzzing crazily and flare out.

Every kiss is here somewhere, all over me like a fine, shiny grit, like I’m a pale

fish that’s been dipped in a thick swirl of raw egg and dragged through flour,

slid down into a deep skillet, into burning. Today I know I’ve lost no one.

My loves are here: wrists, eyelids, damp toes, all scars, and my mouth

pouring praises, still asking, saying kiss me; when I’m dead kiss this poem,

it needs you to know it goes on, give it your lovely mouth.