Poetry from Quinn Rennerfeldt
By Simple Means: The Medicine of Love and Fucking
“She wished: touch me—kiss my agonies, wounds, pains, blemish. She supposes he has at this moment—she pretends. She does pretend. She does.”
-The Limit, Rosalind Belben
At night we writhe and root and
the air fills with wet earth.
There is no margin
between sex and the grotesque
but I will awaken, tuberculosian
and tired from failure
and take temperature with
my hand’s back to your head.
There is a progression: from
the unknown to the dividing line
between what is
malignant, what is benign. The goal
posts are moved another two
months out but I ache for
answers and so rub myself
against you,
perhaps to worm
my way inside
you, a thread
of fiberglass working
into the bloodstream. I want
to be carried to each curious
corner of your body, granted
the power of prognos-
tication, as if by magic.
I plumb the backside of
your reddened
skin, your eyes, stuff
myself into the pores, ooze
into the atmosphere by
way of your breath, your saliva
on the tips of your teeth. My treatment
plan will make you
erect, the best
source detection
So I can call to
arms every orifice,
the avenues through
which one expunges
the body terrorist. I
will throat the trumpet, siren-
call the immune
system’s legions.
Trust me, I’ll say,
my mouth has
the power to eradicate
lesions.
Information Enters The Ganglia, Excites The Nerves, and Flees
I want to save the big pulsing brain in the bell jar. Wed the drooling beast. Sop up my tears in its fur. I want to feel a fang raking my vein. Shiver at the threat of love and fucking. Someone please pick me up by my rag doll neck and shake me alive. The day has a way of deciding how I will feel. People the size of poppyseeds move about the city. Salt-colored fog saturates everything. The bus is thirty minutes late, and then two buses arrive at the same time. There’s no sense to any of this, so I construct my life in miniature. March small figurines on their predictable paths. Make them kiss, drive cars, die. But every once in a while, a large cat walks through the scene. Someone inevitably falls over. The boundaries of the world are written anew. In this one, today, we are adding monsters to the village. Rejoice! the townspeople cry. We are terrified, and so very excited.
Ophidian
I dream that I have joined back up with some place. A glen of mossy
roots and black-barked trees. An expanse of cold red sand. The
choreography of satellites in the sky, syncing my breath to their bleeps.
My face poised over a lover’s bare stomach. Some fake antidote to
aloneness. Upon waking, the isolation of the cosmos stabs the gag reflex.
Expelled: ropes of intestine, peachy bladder, bile and urine and my very
own blood. Hollowed out like the half-shell of a mussel. The back side
of my skin, iridescent and dark. Perhaps I can drink up absence to be
full. Swallow dark matter and hydrogen and a life’s regrets. Force my
mouth open with my fingers and clamber inside. Constrict like a snake,
and call the strangle home.
