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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.

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. 
ISSN 2157-8079
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