Two poems by Jennifer MacKenzie

Pre-iceberg mid-ocean

I gnaw on my mouth on the train while telling myself not to
The mail-order wives, overplush sofas of my youth
sponge up screams, shepherd my soft pale pink back into the nights

in America under a big chandelier that fills my chest with ice
Blond women selling their hair injure their faces to produce
an altered shapeliness, their lips a pert woodland scene

Except my littlest sister who wants a cut crystal glass
but gets a plastic one and shrieks. What are these beautiful shells
of mirth and hair, this gala mentality still sponsored by deep fear

of eros masked with purchasable purity aka Titanic poster
by Vinolia Otto Toilet Soap: The Highest Standard of Toilet Luxury
and Comfort at sea. Ritz-Carlton prisoner dies as we plunge on though
absolute zero like Mussolini trying to take his mistress with him

In bed at the resort I wanted to die and couldn’t move
and was surprised into a silence I think is illusory

Versus actually approaching the witness box, the witness
a funnel of fire with a human body at the center. Ask her

What is considered a liberating garment. Why
are there so many paintings of white women looking down

The new wealth test

The adjunct’s organs fill up with water
until her heart can’t pump it all. Like her I bow
to the pillars of agreements we built about money

So I am formless today in the waists of seaweed
and the tails of kelp attached to a planet captive to its fall

Green grows over a battalion lying fallow
under the sea which kind of tastes like cum

It’s because I was insufficiently mothered
that I don’t have a good bullshit detector

My sister says her real mother is a skyscraper
with a spike rising from her forehead

Whole intact and glistening at the prow
of commerce, it could impale a passing cloud

This sister sleeps with a knife under her pillow
like our mother. In my dream I rush fleeing
with many others toward a waiting plane

It becomes a house just before it explodes
One window sails neatly over me, its frame in flames

In waking life I discover the only part
of construction I enjoy is demolition

Samson held 300 foxes in his hands
and set their tails on fire. They ran
through the fields and burned them to the ground

I make my class say enmity in unison
Maybe because I have a spike

rising from my forehead. It is not a crown
it is enmity picnicking around us

I am still the red newborn not dying
inside a heated cube. I am still tiny and trying
to break it open with my screams

All water on this planet is alien
and arrived by crash landing