If Your Family Owned a Mausoleum, then This Poem Would Make More Sense
Your sisters have found corpses: beautiful
one in the bath, the other hell
bent on their driving wheel, you say
your corpse has not yet been
behind cabinet door, scythed between
the smooth S-folds of faucet pipes under
sink nor face down, undercurrent, bumping bloated
limbs underbrush in bog water.
Your body has been undertaking the weight
of preposition and place, you say, so easily
you’d swear it was still alive: laid bare
against the far corner’s molding
under bed, underage, you, un-
derfoot-tow-tone-cut-press-pin
but you don’t dare mind, you know
you’ll find it close to home—
like your second brother bid, it will be
considered self-afflicted, understated,
and no one speaks of the elder, underroof
under God’s thumb and your dead’s
stuporous shuffle to their plots. Stories
hidden in plain sight, you say, ghosts
and coroners, triggers set
the tocsin’s tongue to toll, yet underkill.
Self Portrait with Hand Study and Jung’s Word Association Test
There you superannuate (as in antiquated, as prove
obsolete) an excessive prefix, a fifth meta-
carpal (as in situated behind or beyond [as in
grandmother, mother, daughter, XX chromosome])
hamate bone all hammered up. Little pink
pinkie, what to do phalanx (as in osseous, in itchy
finger) with calcification (as in rigidity, as in
hardening by impregnation [as saturate, fill throughout])
conceive? The use for corset so different now
since youth (as in rogue, as in wee wee wee—)
wanton, the green (as in not properly aged)
arrogance (as in an offensive display) of a high
school pep or a dry hump until chapped
in the back library stacks, such fine paper
tiger lines (as an appearance of strength) this hand
(as properly middle-aged [as insignificant])
has written —all the way home. Reams
of Times New Roman, font 12, format set to
No Spacing (as in memories running red
rover: as in marksman, as in bullet [holed])
O grave New England sky (as in granite face [stiff lip])
O arthritic ache (as in afflicted) upon pen and
sticky trigger: this ode of black bile and measure
owed to lousy melancholy, barometric pressure.
Dorinda Wegener is a Co-founder and Managing Editor of Trio House Press, a non-profit literary publisher of full-length poetry books. Her poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Hotel Amerika, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Poetry City, USA, and Hinchas de Posia, et al. She has work forthcoming in Berkeley Poetry Review and anthologized in Poets Showcase: An Anthology of New Hampshire Poets (Hobblebush Books, 2015). Most recently, she was solicited to participate in Damfino Press’ Five Poems Chapbook Series; her chapbook, Five Poems by Dorinda Wegener was released in November 2015.