Hymn for the Black Terrific

"Each of the book's three sections dramatizes how even in our high-flying fantasy lives, the ordinariness of the natural reasserts itself as a source of both limitation, and, paradoxically, extraordinary beauty."?David Gorin, The Believer

A woman is a lordly thing. Hard as belts.
Mean as cat dirt in the dark. A woman rakes
her own self down to the girders. A little air
seeps in, a little smoke & buzz.

Some say I'm a woman. Some call me so.
No matter what I do, I just get handsomer.
Count my ribs. Now count my belts of fat.
Only one of us can get off. Guess who?

You talk, mild as mallow. I must've built you
from a kit. So fast your teeth fit the marks
in my head. Woman, woman you say.
Maybe I'm a sunfish, conjuring in the deep.

It takes more than blood to bring me down.
Watch me press my woman's tongue to your gullet.
You spit & jaw & call in the old meters til I'm sick
with sensing you. Open the door.

It's not love I want, but form. I'll roost here
in your headful of sunfish. You said: a woman craves
a devil for her darling. You lion claw. Come see
what I've digged with the teeth of my face.

Kiki Petrosino is the author of Fort Red Border (Sarabande Books, 2009) and the co-editor of Transom, an independent online poetry journal. Poems have appeared in Tin House, FENCE, Jubilat, Gulf Coast, and The New York Times. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches at the University of Louisville.