Appetites
There are still days when I want to lick
the plate clean, and by that, I mean
really clean; no smears of berry sauce, no
errant pea quivering in a dab of aspic on
the white china plate’s thin side. A friend,
estranged now, had rats as pets. When
the mom, named, in my memory, Nimh,
gave birth to her colony of gray babies, she
ate them up, one after the other, then rested.
“She was too young,” we all agreed, “not yet
ready for rat motherhood.” That kind of hunger——
staggering, gluttonous, maybe even evolutionary——
feels like something to be marked. Because no one
knows, do they, if it will return after the last pool
of gravy is sopped. Some say you grow to resemble
your pets, and my friend did a little——watchful, like a rat,
nose always tilted to sniff the air for dormant storms
or treats. If there sat a pink petit four, tiny-tiered and
daisy-frosted, on my table waiting to be savored, she
needed it to be in her mouth before me. I have cats.
One insists on ice, and so every night I crush and plate
the frozen chunks, to her beastly delight and mine. The
meat hammer feels right in my hand, and pellucid slivers
sent flying will melt, eventually, on the cement kitchen
countertop, harming no one. My own dessert is also cold——
cotton-candy grapes straight from the freezer while light
lingers in the sky. But in the dim, after cats and men have gone
to sleep, I rummage cupboards for chocolate and grease, I feast.
Bad Things
People who do bad things are interesting,
like super villains, 80’s Joker with a card up his sleeve
sleeps with the boss’s wife, plucks everything
he wants as though those peaches are grown
just for him. Then vat of acid and the shove——retribution
is a drag, but the pain’s what we’ve been waiting for.
He can’t really capture our hearts until they paint on that smile
and the body count rises. Paradise Lost——the devil smirks,
“And what can Heaven show more?” He’s a take-charge guy
those other fallen angels sulking while he plans
a new world, a kingdom rising from the deep,
Pandemonium. There is nothing interesting about
herbal tea, the fluffed pillow, holding your partner’s hand
while the fever burns and they gasp for breath. I want
blood, I want to be the last one at the party, stick around
until the hookers come and someone suggests blindfolds.
Why not blindfolds? So this call girl, I think her name
was Jeana, it’s not important, what mattered was the money
owed, her cell phone ringing and that no one seemed to know
the rules of the game. It was enough to cover our eyes
tie dish rags around each other’s faces, black bandages
soaked in the cigarette murk of our gin-glass ashtray, soaked
in the liquid night pressing in all around us as we spun and
staggered through the rooms where I kept bumping into things
so peeked beneath, tried to glimpse what was coming next——Jeana
on her knees, the phone gone dumb, then a knock at the door.
Faithful
A famous-ish writer tells me
my poems aren’t faithful
She quotes Browning, Rilke,
shuffles pages— see? How hollow
my lines, how trifling they read
when laid like entrails, end to end.
She means to help, maybe. There is
talk of God. What she gets right
are my words’ junk hearts. Forget
faith. What good to gossip God now?
He’s left the building, no blue
suede shoes for ages and my poems
need to grind. They scorn
one at a time. Yes, my poems
are a little slutty——any partner will do——
all true. What she got wrong
is the tune. It was never Elvis, that
skin suit wrapped around peanut butter
bacon white bread slop. Agreeable to fall
on your knees for pale Jesus in sequins,
a pop hit cobbled of shop-lifted parts——
American Muzak hymns never stop. My
song is less adoptable——a raw cut, a lost
track. My song is a red preemie squalling
and doesn’t give a rat’s ass about faithfulness.
Laura Bandy attended the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers PhD program from 2009 to 2013, where she received the Joan Johnson Poetry Award. In 2018, she won first prize in the “Trio of Triolets” contest and received third place in the Illinois Emerging Writers Competition that same year. She has had work published in Midwest Review, River Styx, Typo, The Florida Review, and The Laurel Review, among others, and has work currently or forthcoming in Bennington Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, SWEET: A Literary Confection and AUTOCORRECT. Her chapbook, Hack, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2021, and her full collection, Monster Movie, was published by Gold Wake Press in 2023. A favorite revenge moment comes at the end of Pan’s Labyrinth, when evil Captain Vidal says, “Tell my son the time that his father died.” And Mercedes replies, “No. He won’t even know your name,” before shooting him.
