Zoe Dzunko
​

CACOLOGY

She will break hearts
some day. These words
spill with an innocuous
grace and in them
we rejoice. Here I am
in my jumpsuit
with its shrub-spotted
savannahs, the blunt claws
of apex predators
and their ragged stripes.
This from the man
in the mall, making
immortal my second
of childhood. His pastel
powdered hands
turning the face dusty
and lightly seraphic,
a little sepia memory
before the future hits it.
Already, I am momentous.
He has drawn me this way.
Not exactly pivotal,
but stitched into time
and its bodily passages.
That is what he catalyzes
with those very words,
this man. I am four years
old. Already, I am a body
on hold. I sit with the promise
of a balloon artist
within me, memorizing
the shape I would later
demand. Poodle, I imagine.
Pink, I would respond.

PEDAGOGY

The way he did it was by promising revelation.
I moved backwards like a lineage
executing itself, my spine boning the coiled wire.
He was wrong. It was not at all reminiscent
of a long-divided body reformed,
as much as it was two halves being jimmied
haphazardly apart. I hurried to my after-school job

inside the dusty hollow of a strip mall, my burgundy
culottes and my shitty hat. Drained a can
of Diet Coke before the hour turned, rolling the silver
rind in my new hands. The pliable skin
of former density, no longer redolent of a thirst
recently quenched, as it was of the lacunal
gap learning its new state of empty

tinny with the sound of it. The day ticked itself forward
and in my split mind the sense of moment
after a diet is prematurely broken: the flesh betraying
itself for itself. I had nothing else with which
to compare, save for the memory of my discipline.
There are no lessons, my body circles its context.
I was something before this. A bright little miracle.

PREFIX

The boys of my youth wanted me
Inside chained to the black box
The VCR and its endless scroll
Of trashy college comedies bloated
With swimming pools and empty
Reds floating their flimsy surfaces
Everybody gets the girl in the end
That is the twist of masculine idealism
It being denser than submission
Wait them out and the women will
Eventually crumble as the world
Outside carried on without me
They would make their demands
In tidy orders: an end of the evening
Phone call notifying them of my solitude
Pacing alone in my bedroom a little
Dove lowering its wings to quietly perch
A delicate flower pulling its buds in
A pink ribbon rolling itself into one
Glossy spool of untouchable surfaces
With the soft mass of pillow puffed
Against my cheek I would press a palm
To calibrate my heat I would swallow
Against my will the phrase beauty
Sleep beauty sleep like many homely
Mammals counted but I was never tired
With the gape of boredom and its matte
Dentalium currencies with their restless
Prickling of my limbs I don’t want to
Be delicate I would tell the dark room
But this is what you make me.

EFFIGY

It is true I’ll see her everywhere
That girl I used to breathe
Inside outside look at these two
Delicate angels walking their dogs
Along the footpath freshly plucked
From the palms of their mothers’
Active wear hugging them closely
And their knees still archetypal
They resolutely bone-like
We wear our age like masks of fallen
Snow succumbing to the soft transition
Towards an inevitable bemiring
That is my direction I trudge it
A long white bow a lonely ribbon
Tangled in my hair he later confessed
To having witnessed me walking
Along the street pushing nothing
In front of me but my body
Recognisably robbed of all adolescent
Affectations in public domain
Are the mantle I lap over myself
Like a wave safe keeping its sand
Aware of you watching I wonder
Upon which street did I walk visibly
Imperceptive I must have been
On Asbury or Main but my mind
Autopilots like a camera zoomed in
On its very vessel imagines how today
Is at once the oldest you have ever been
And the youngest you will ever again
Be grateful and enjoy the body
You have while you still have it
Before dying a woman told me this
While it felt nothing short of total
In its momentousness it proved quieting
Of nothing these aches still make
The nightly visit waking and trailing me
To morning where I rise roused like a hip
Bone pressing firm against the casket
Of skin you may ask me whatever
You need to be willing to hear
My truth does it hurt you that no
Part of this body arranges itself
For your eyes heavy with gaze
At night I crawl from the sheath of myself
Light a candle in my honour
It throwing the scent of fresh flesh
What I mean is scented like powder
And honey with the slightest redolence
Of spit I hunger only for my hunger
For my own spaces purple deep
There where the ember in me fumes
To return to the rib of itself renunciative
Of whatever deigns to conceal it
It is all I am and it is all I ever was.

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ZOE DZUNKO is the author of four chapbooks, most recently SELFLESS (TAR, 2016). She is the Poetry Editor of The Lifted Brow and in 2014 founded Powder Keg Magazine, an online poetry quarterly, with Sarah Jean Grimm. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House (The Open Bar), Guernica, Australian Book Review, Prelude, The Fanzine et al. She is online at: zoedzunko.tumblr.com