Avocados
BY KENDRA DECOLO
Let’s get wasted as avocados,
solemn and shapely
in their alligator skins, lucid, sweet-talking
lovers laid bare on rough blankets,
two-for-a-dollar magic
sacked and clutched
in a child’s alley-way
hand. Let’s get foamed, salty-eyed,
dismembered into smoothness,
gilded and glyphed
onto a retired stripper’s back, smoked
and spooled, grifters of the sea, shucked
to a mineral glow. Let’s get stupid. Opalescent.
God-complexioned. Viscera strangled
to a shimmer. Ghosted, vanquished,
viscous as hashish, lacquered and whispered
into the Guadalquivir’s ear. Let’s get squalid and romantic
in the squid-pink light
roughing up the tulips, then let’s stumble
down the throat of 3 a.m.
to the titty bar
where Magda will stroke our faces
like children before breaking our jaws
with those ungodly breasts
and we will cry out with a tenderness
that betrays our hunger, our voices
thatched into a roof
that collapses under her weight,
twinkling like half-formed
hearts terrorizing
her vastness, green and wild as
another country. Bearable
music wincing between moans.
Let’s get wasted as avocados,
solemn and shapely
in their alligator skins, lucid, sweet-talking
lovers laid bare on rough blankets,
two-for-a-dollar magic
sacked and clutched
in a child’s alley-way
hand. Let’s get foamed, salty-eyed,
dismembered into smoothness,
gilded and glyphed
onto a retired stripper’s back, smoked
and spooled, grifters of the sea, shucked
to a mineral glow. Let’s get stupid. Opalescent.
God-complexioned. Viscera strangled
to a shimmer. Ghosted, vanquished,
viscous as hashish, lacquered and whispered
into the Guadalquivir’s ear. Let’s get squalid and romantic
in the squid-pink light
roughing up the tulips, then let’s stumble
down the throat of 3 a.m.
to the titty bar
where Magda will stroke our faces
like children before breaking our jaws
with those ungodly breasts
and we will cry out with a tenderness
that betrays our hunger, our voices
thatched into a roof
that collapses under her weight,
twinkling like half-formed
hearts terrorizing
her vastness, green and wild as
another country. Bearable
music wincing between moans.
Kendra DeColo’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the 2012 Best of the Net Anthology, Vinyl Poetry, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, CALYX, Split This Rock: Poems of Witness and Provocation, Printer’s Devil Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a work-study scholarship from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, residency awards from the Millay Colony and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Kendra is the founding poetry editor of Nashville Review and lives in Nashville, Tennessee.