new from above/ground press: my beatrice, by Orchid Tierney

my beatrice
orchid tierney
$5

VII

My Beatrice & I watch the primary

debates because we are monstrous fictions.

This, excites Beatrice, is the moment when

the evil Brain arrives from Planet Arous.

I look backward to the nuclear sequence

where everyone is incinerated. Then it is

three minutes to midnight. A woman without

perfume refuses Dante’s future. I believe in

demons & sprites. I believe in canopies

so tired from painful touching. There is

little difference between twilights & mourning.

Beatrice, some days her muse will ace her desire.

“If you’re ever going to love me,” put on the drier.

I will deliver her punchline after I forget my joke.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July 2020
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Orchid Tierney is an Aotearoa-New Zealand poet and scholar, currently living in Gambier, Ohio, where she teaches at Kenyon College. She is the author of a year of misreading the wildcats (Operating System, 2019) and Earsay (TrollThread 2016), and chapbooks ocean plastic (BlazeVOX 2019), blue doors (Belladonna* Press), Gallipoli Diaries (GaussPDF 2017), the world in small parts (Dancing Girl Press, 2012), and Brachiaction (Gumtree, 2012). Other poems, reviews, and scholarship have appeared in Jacket2, Journal of Modern Literature, and Western Humanities Review, among others. She is a consulting editor for the Kenyon Review.

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