I realize I want you
—After Atwood
(or me, at least) to die
violently. Fit
the bright height of our human souls into
some stilted shape—
Coffin? Urn? Splatter me—
let liquor lacquer our lilac walls like
all these mosquito limbs. Your love is a
Pollock stroke—art,
or art adjacent.
Hook
your bicep beneath my brain—spooned into
your nightmare
every witching hour. Find an
arc of purple pooling under my eye
blooming deeper,
dark by dark.
You are a
dream in death throes—thrashing from a fishhook
beneath your web of tongue.
I lie in an
embrace with you,
my hate,
awake, open
thighs,
digging my thumbnail into your eye.
Paint Me a Leda
—After Yeats
I am sick of the Leda who lies still
as she’s done since the first paintbrush caressed
canvas, reclined her nude in the grass. Bill
this the violence of art—to press breast
to white down, for a slender hand to push
just hard enough. Give me Leda with thighs
like bear traps, skull-crushing, ready to rush
the sky on her own wings. Leda who lies
poised, nails polished red on her lush shore. There,
emery board-sharp, she will gouge that tower-
neck, break beak
like a fortune cookie. Fists up,
feathered in slaughter, she will paint the air,
redden the water, taste a haughty power—
shove away the swan. Let the dead god drop.
Madison Rahner is a biographer living in South Carolina where she recently earned her MA in Writing from Coastal Carolina University. She has poems forthcoming in Popshot Quarterly and The Threepenny Review. Twitter and Instagram: @madisonrahner
Photo by www.ilkkajukarainen.fi on Foter.com / CC BY-ND