ODE TO MUGLER’S VENUS ENDING IN A BOY’S FACE
by Lillian Witsoe
Venus first appeared to me in my bedroom
in a magazine
I was 11 years old
I couldn't get closer than
cutting it out, taping her
on the vanity, how romance was
still like her skin, stagnant and shellacked.
Loud light/ hard diva
un- devoured alone/ devoured each other.
The body, is again blinging, is
through the dark undressed,
even as it’s darting pink flash
it is shining, still.
Venus makes a skeleton.
There was a glossiness shared
between us two, and so I offered
everything I could carry before
I let everything else arrive
pitted to my skull.
Wearing the velvet of myself, I settled
blooms in the carpet, so as
to wade through them,
hitching myself to her pearls
so as to be un-swallowed,
to grow glowing blue. Ornamenting
myself her cellophane skin, undigestible.
The cool kind was not born, no, not wet,
not new, not naked, not naming, and so
I won’t be either. Why does it always
seem to undress? The sheen of sweat on the boy,
tonight’s brow, how it hangs, glitters, sealing
starlight. All ultramarine acrylics
pointing toward Venus, and in my silver
shadow reaching toward my browbone,
the gleam from a red lip gloss
drawn large around the lips. We still are,
the cool kind tonight. The boy
believes in me. Me in Venus.
When I say I love plastic, it is
because it cannot be swallowed-