Olga-Helga, I value
your stuff. With my odalisque
curves, my delirious
cockatiel heart
Be aware: I’m unusual. Oh
I’m the stuffer
who’ll stuff you
to gills
with (my) gold
You bagged
me good without
soiling your prawns, Olga-
Helga. I drift
through the aqueous blue. Toodle-
loo, toodle-loo. You
bagged me, I bit you.
You brained me, I made you
a chainsaw for felling
trees. Isn’t love? Such a
lowly condition. I’m a
great big
banana
for you, and you
you’re my
wide-brimmed
yellow-clad
fool
I’ve done my time in the hippodrome, working
shit out. I’m the blonde
with blue eyes, I’m Dick,
the dining room furniture
king, I’m a sad ol’ dissolute
seraphim. Olga, come
hither and do
what agrarian villagers
do. I keep
my hands whiter
than napkins, myself. I’m
the brain,
and a basketcase, baby. Don’t shy away—
even you
can come
closer, come
write to me
on my
Electronic
Box.
I’ve been kinda bored
I’ve been taking
a bunch
of hot/funny photos. Should I
post them
all over
your rubbery breasts? That’s
not talk from a “dying world”
Olga—that’s straight
from the cradle of life/sex/death. Here I am
banked on the river,
braiding
my hair. Where are you
little silver-scaled
bird, immaterial
queen?
Face-down
and shivering
in
the
abyss
eating words
Olga, you linger
and cling
to the hive, to that
dirty unworthy metropolis.
Girl, you go
strutting around.
Like a slattern. Doggy.
Effete. The world
brings plague
to its smuttiest squirrels while you
nosh
down at Wing Stop. Take a
fetuslike look
into space; now sit
with the blood
and the triumph
of brain. Abide
in that place. Down the yellowbrick road
we were Pilates and
trilobites
once we were wholly
divine
Olga Olga Olga your Zoloft is mine
I love you
like Emma. I love you like
Pride. I love you like Jane Austen
dollars, I love
to insert you in snide
conversations with fuckwads
-slash-
colleagues of mine. Alas
we are not
metatarsal, we bones
we belong
in the hands. Muscled shut
you’re shinola-won’t-
grease-you-back-
into-my-life. Mrs. Darling
my privy
you’re privy
to all whom the jillions
despise
Lo in the water, Olga,
you hold me. How long is your chain and how barbed
your panoptic maw
am I heavy to bear & contain am I human or
something that ruts. Rusts. And disintegrates. Now
I’m a merman coming
apart. Now a poisonous
cloud of red dust. I was exhaled
into the ducts
and then
and then
I blew up
Olga, who dresses
your hair, and who plucked
that purple-black
plumage you wear
from the ether? Not I—
I’m a decorous
turd. A dusted-down
armored-up suit
of conditions. As in: if you
have saturnine grace
if you’ve been false
or estranged
if you’ve arranged a bamboozle: I’ll swaddle you
in my wet clinging metal. It’s gentle.
Filigree. Silvery. Still
it’s a chain
Olga, your kung pao
chicken is here. To lay
waste to your bowels. Grab
a glacier! Embrace it! Its surface
aglitter
with shit from the birds
of the centuries. Drink
the deep blue. Find it
cooling, steady. Let it
irrigate all
your canals, let it
sluice
you
out
until only bare rock
and your ironclad
gluttony
thrive
Image Credits: Carolyn Saxby
Laura Sims is the author of four books of poetry: Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), My god is this a man, Stranger, and Practice, Restraint (Fence Books). In 2014 she edited Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson, a book of her correspondence with the celebrated experimental novelist (powerHouse Books). Her work was included in The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, and individual poems have recently appeared in Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, andGulf Coast. She has published book reviews and essays in Boston Review, Evening Will Come, Jacket, New England Review, Rain Taxi and The Review of Contemporary Fiction.