Your Sorrow
Is a Saran-Wrap fit where no
Puncture goes, and like a high school
Boyfriend, it puts its cigarette out
On my arm while I’m driving.
I want to insert my needle, inflate
Your pain to a tight psi, and punt
It to the neighbor’s yard, let the dogs
Tear it around until the hexagons rip.
I’m looking for the entrance,
Understanding that your chrysalis
Is woven hard, that your sadness
Will strike out on its beautiful wings,
A little fragile now, a little stunned
For having wintered so long.
Puncture goes, and like a high school
Boyfriend, it puts its cigarette out
On my arm while I’m driving.
I want to insert my needle, inflate
Your pain to a tight psi, and punt
It to the neighbor’s yard, let the dogs
Tear it around until the hexagons rip.
I’m looking for the entrance,
Understanding that your chrysalis
Is woven hard, that your sadness
Will strike out on its beautiful wings,
A little fragile now, a little stunned
For having wintered so long.
Three for Girls
1
When I first saw you, whatever had been
Lost its nursling taste, and the world went hard,
All our motions symbolic and heavy.
The vision of you was a sustaining weight
Pulling the ropes of my eyes shut
To the collapsing school yard, how my friends
Were calling me fool.
And then you’d transcend
My home-built love tokens with cruelty:
Trashing the cheap ring, teasing the fealty
Devotion of the hashed-out sonnets I jammed
Down your rusty locker, rejecting each door
I propped open.
I wanted that vision
To worship, but your catechism learned
Me to desire, to wait, and to stand wide.
2
There was a music to how you laughed, jived
Us in love’s transformation: You could song
It out, tripping down impromptu scales,
Casting us in the major or minor tones
I tried to read and sing along,
Picking up the harmony, trying to wail
My exuberance, shake your lovely bones
To a mutual hymn, a top forty, a groovy vibe.
When we went to the amusement park,
And I snapped you strumming so hard,
Striking the string of our love out of tune,
Out of use, in my hunting for crescendo,
We were each attempting to solo,
Play into new selves, each of us our own.
3
You beat me down like the metal, gold-thin
Ribbon tied and bowed around your finger,
Holding shape, warding off rusting hunger
Through a constant wearing along your skin.
Your eyes bang on me like hammers,
Twisting my face to tragedy or wide
Into farce, and your creamy hands ride
My length like anvils, another grammar
Of standing, dressing, being stamped into
Me, and the tongs of your legs snatching me
From your displeasure’s fire, the cool hiss the
Tears wring when the shape’s held and you
Forgive me and bring me on again, tamp
Me with a word, your mouth a dreamy clamp.
When I first saw you, whatever had been
Lost its nursling taste, and the world went hard,
All our motions symbolic and heavy.
The vision of you was a sustaining weight
Pulling the ropes of my eyes shut
To the collapsing school yard, how my friends
Were calling me fool.
And then you’d transcend
My home-built love tokens with cruelty:
Trashing the cheap ring, teasing the fealty
Devotion of the hashed-out sonnets I jammed
Down your rusty locker, rejecting each door
I propped open.
I wanted that vision
To worship, but your catechism learned
Me to desire, to wait, and to stand wide.
2
There was a music to how you laughed, jived
Us in love’s transformation: You could song
It out, tripping down impromptu scales,
Casting us in the major or minor tones
I tried to read and sing along,
Picking up the harmony, trying to wail
My exuberance, shake your lovely bones
To a mutual hymn, a top forty, a groovy vibe.
When we went to the amusement park,
And I snapped you strumming so hard,
Striking the string of our love out of tune,
Out of use, in my hunting for crescendo,
We were each attempting to solo,
Play into new selves, each of us our own.
3
You beat me down like the metal, gold-thin
Ribbon tied and bowed around your finger,
Holding shape, warding off rusting hunger
Through a constant wearing along your skin.
Your eyes bang on me like hammers,
Twisting my face to tragedy or wide
Into farce, and your creamy hands ride
My length like anvils, another grammar
Of standing, dressing, being stamped into
Me, and the tongs of your legs snatching me
From your displeasure’s fire, the cool hiss the
Tears wring when the shape’s held and you
Forgive me and bring me on again, tamp
Me with a word, your mouth a dreamy clamp.
Jared Pearce is teaching himself guitar.
