Emily Pittinos

ORPHAN, LISSOME IN THE DUST STORM

ORPHAN, LISSOME IN THE DUST STORM

ORPHAN, LISSOME IN THE DUST STORM

ORPHAN, LISSOME IN THE DUST STORM

ORPHAN, LISSOME IN THE DUST STORM

 

 

I don’t need a mirror to know my kind. Skin—
             dropped blossom pierced on the wind.

The pitaya is a lure in bloom. I reach into thorns,
             surprised by the sting, and resentful. I want

to wreck an easier thing: blood in the water, the loss not my own.
The animal ruins at my feet, unsaveable, a result
                                                                                           I’ve come to expect from the living. I miss

not being consumed. Once, a body: just the husk of an inside held dear.
             Now: all the power, and failing.

ORPHAN, LISSOME IN THE DUST STORM

 

 

I dredge memory edge to edge. The question: what was real.

 

In the odder hours, I study what taints the nighttime

as mistakes steal the shape of what surrounds:

 

 

                                                 –     glass pitcher of hornets

 

                                                 –     bruised melon in the bin

 

                                                 –     jellyfish of cum, flotsam in a water glass

 

                                                 –     spring rain coaxes violets only to drown them

 

                                                 –     the forced bloom i needlessly tend to

                                                                     (this iris, i refuse to lose her, too—exposed sparrow heart,

                                                                     apricot jam too sweet to bear)

 

In other words, I punish myself.

ORPHAN, LISSOME IN THE DUST STORM

 

 

I become Lost Daughter, bowed before her hollow-bodied tower—

 

 

              Some days: brittle. Some days: velvet. Still others: padded by a whorl of petals.

              The white-flowering trees that smell like cum tell her sex is a mill for bad feeling.

 

              Beware: her floral dress, its stigma and ovule winking from the circumference of a twirl.

              Beware: the last carnival in town, the tunnel of love unsound. A tightrope strung over no one suggests

 

              the infinite ways in which one can be left—old loss made new through reproduction.

              She picks fever ninety-nine times, the jukebox soon a puddle she gladly wades through,

 

              that puddle soon a pond tense with fallen petals.

ORPHAN, LISSOME IN THE DUST STORM

 

 

Again, the wheat, or are they tall dead grasses? Whatever they are, they burn.

The plains wear a molten cloak cooled to indigo

                                                                                          by twilight. Sunset proves nothing

holds color. Sagebrush to seafoam. Wheat fronds to lit wicks. The endless water vapor

is ocher, now lavender, now

                                                       the herds of Holsteins tonguing brush are more than blurs:

iridescent scavengers, pale hard skulls, one eye to the road,

                                                                                                               the other lost, lost to the dark.

biography

EMILY PITTINOS is a teaching writer currently living in Boise, ID. A creative writing instructor at Interlochen Arts Camp, a Writers in the Schools teacher, and an Associate Editor for Poetry Northwest, Pittinos received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she served as the Senior Fellow in Poetry. Her recent work appears, or will soon appear, in Michigan Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, New England Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.