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Tschirgi.jpg

Two Poems by Katrin Tschirgi

December 8, 2015

By Katrin Tschirgi

 

Saint Sin

It's amazing I'm not shooting heroin

into my eyeballs. I have a thing for innocence.

Like, bad.         Like, in a bad way.

Like I want to peel it off me

like lingerie. I'm beside myself

with grief for all the men I haven't fucked

just because I could. Listen:

 

I'm tired of being cute. On Tuesday,

I wore nothing but an apron and dismembered

an orange as though it were an oyster

or a man. Shucking cold fruit of their shells

saying love me love me love me.



 

Catch & Release

My home was the river

my father fished.

and I was the fish. I was born

with an open mouth, a curved needle

pierced through my cheek. I flossed with line.

He says—away with you! And I float roe-belly

towards the sun. He discards the trash—

the heart still beating, the nest

of veins thrown into the river

after the gutting, fingers

stretched through the spleen,

running the length of the glass-spun spine.

The Big Wood is shallow, water wrong

for this season. The Fish and Game water

their whiskey with a melted glacier.

 

One day soon, my father says, you will be good

with lemon. 

 

When my father dies,

they toss me yet again over the side of the boat,

and I turn into a canoe.

(What a miracle

that I was a setting sail and you were an anchor,

claw-footed and sunk to the bottom of my sea).

 

Stonefly, watch, June bug—the sinker is on

the line.


 

It is my father and I floating now,

at the foot of the ladder, unable to make the jump.

His body light as my body, weighing nothing more.

There, we are boat and human,

 

and I the boat

and the fish

and my father

go down stream in our varnish.

In Poetry Tags Katrin Tschirgi
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