Horoscope

Madeleine Mori

First published in Salt Hill 41 (2018).

Do we sleep through this each night? you will hear him ask
of the holly in your front yard, swearing himself
witness to their blooming, the little heartmeats
red and variegated as his neck at hour two
of an unholy drug. You will not finish
the chicken nuggets, remembering the sludge
in its glinting trough, oleaginous as warm icing,
a funny cake frothing before cleaved
from the mold’s steel eye. You will have no way
of knowing the perverted gutmatter already sewn
neat into his stomach like a Victorian cuff,
the apple core-sized discovery not due
for another three years, as you dance on the night
of Lou Reed’s death, your lips pressed fragrant
to his forehead. You will leave your home
in search of hot dance, hot booze, bedraggled,
colorblind stomping the highway’s crabgrass skirt.
Sweet ram, who nuzzled the linchpin loose,
will be carried high on a stem like balsam,
laid to bed in the earth like basalt. Sweet bull,
rollicking in your meadow, today you lock horn,
but tomorrow, you will have the love branded
out of you. You will self-slander, etherize, gone
procedure-like. You will go a very long time
in the wrong shoes, and when you run out of concrete,
you will reach for any abstract rescue.
You will lose the body, dig a grave so small
it floods at the sight of a single branch of holly.

Madeleine Mori is a Japanese-American poet born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She earned her MFA from New York University, where she served as a Poetry Editor of Washington Square Review. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The jubilat, DIAGRAM, the American Poetry Review, and The Yale Review, among others. She lives in Brooklyn.