The Pleasure Notebook
Alex Lemon


1

Bend closer—taste the thumbprint mirror, lick a bit of struck-match mercy

Shadow-laced & red, light helps splinter the cruelty met with a flayed body

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What named me, the moth pleads, banging jazz from light bulbs

................................................Whose flash can raw a perfect face?
................................................Meaning is the glistening cobweb
................................................Smooth, a spider’s deceptive legs

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I need breath thick with fire, syrup spilled from a swollen heart

I need bites promising grace. Luminous, a tongue that prays for wounds

2

................................................Naked shapes devour winter light
They sizzle, salt the topography of despair

Stare & the body’s brittle math twists into uncertainty
.................................................Mime-lips mashing sleet-swept cheeks

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I say nothing in defense of the hand

But praise drool’s fine silk stringing from a thigh

The furred wing wrenched off in honey

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A static-voice hammers thick over the leafless tree’s growling

Sheets are sap-streaked like bark

Tonight—brass-knuckled love, weep & birthmarks break from the self

3

I don’t care that you sleep on your stomach, groaning fortune cookie koans all night

The limb’s edged knots & I come just thinking of you

Emperor of gasps, paradise of sweaty face

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Feed me the slow lesson of flowers, plum pits knocking teeth & dark

My skin is everyone’s magic trick. How couldn’t it be?

What sad-luck damage would you trade for taste?

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Melodies drill deep wells in the chest

4

As a child I worshipped chains worming through gravel. But now

Is sugar from a heart-wormed pit bull, benediction-slaps from tattooed gods

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Kiss my reflection into brick walls, carve me golden & throaty

5

Streets are gorgeous with pissing dogs, red petal tongues
& grandfather cartwheeling with muscled legs

He didn’t feel the heart’s disintegration
on the slick tile floor. A percussive
axe cracking the bathroom door. Bleached radio
piercing the sun with a tune I’ll never remember

6

Touch the photo that peels clothes. Hunger for it like barefeet

On sun-slivered pavement, cricket legs longing for rubs

Slip me into that train-track bed, torsos weaving

Wicked & blue. City of fence-rust, streetlights bulling for life

Lopsided with fog, what must passengers think staring down dawn?

Bodies arched into something only sewers can name

......................................Orchard of polished ghosts, flesh pimpled with rain

......................................Teeming wordless & terrible, grief dangles from concrete fruit

7

My yard is frail with crushed cans, flat-sailed rubbers

It is the felled redbreast’s grass-jawed grave

Bottle caps like diamonds buried in a finger box of ribs

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Jigsaw morning, the branch hisses mud

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Trodden & cubist. Too much gesso & not enough light

Paint my nothing portrait, use amphetamines

Paint the gift of the neon wasp

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It is the year of the dismembered horse
Bury me with bone-dice instead of eyes