3 by debora kuan

PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN WITH A HOAGIE

                I want to drown in six pounds of macaroni salad.
                The groans of Superbowl Sunday. The cries of triumph.

                I want hoagies
                unfurled from cold foil.

                They’re called hoagies where I come from.

                O beautiful possibilities
                like second-base in a parked car

                in the half-full lot outside a movie cineplex,
                the neon glinting off your corneas.

                When God closes one door, somewhere
                He opens a hoagie

                and jams that football
                mouth with thinly sliced ham

                and honey roast turkey, roast beef,
                cheese, pickles, and shredded lettuce.

                Paper hoagie covers rock hoagie!
                Melted cheddar covers everything.

       TEEN MAMMAL

              The whale dons
               her psychological blubber
               and it tastes so seal.

               She wants to stay huge
               in another man's harbor.

               I don't blame her.

               I yearn to float more too
               in lamb fat,
               to run my tongue over

               other lovers
               and the glory of their molars!

               They're  sharp
               over there, 

              there
               in the clover
               where science grows a moral
               four inches tall

               and we ourselves 
               bear the sex
               consequence of crop circles 
               in our hair.

                  THE BEST INDIE SEX SCENE

             
                In outer space all sex is an imitation of a sex scene in a movie. 

                All the armchairs are a blue moiré that smells like future.

                My future: a distinction between the leaf and the tree, or the the meaning of the leaf and the
                                meaning of the tree.

                The child in the tree wants the biggest brass instrument she can hold and so she chooses the
                                tuba.

                She has made her own head from a chunk of sidewalk and wrapped it in yarn.

                It is not evening at all in the town I think of as home. 

                We celebrate at noon and we shall celebrate all noons.



                By twilight I see your bloated body in the menacing clouds.

                I see all the dogs who suffer cruelly from worms.

                People bring their lawn chairs. They eat prescient chicken from heavy baskets.

                These are the people we come from.

                We come from everything here, even the things that bar us entry.

                The string of lights across the boats, the masts waving fluently like Portuguese.

                The breeze is its own flute and its own arrested jazz.

                You can feel the excitement. How excited the sea is, knowing we are here.

                We are white moles following other white moles.

                We are on our planet, creeping the ground like moles who are singing.

                We are riding our planet by singing.

DEBORA KUAN is the author of XING. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Awl, HTMLGiant, and Gigantic. She is a senior editor at Brooklyn Arts Press and a director at the College Board, and has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and Macdowell.