BY ALYSE BENSEL
Pretty Lips
Calostoma lutescens
A toothless invitation
to earthly delights,
I purse, ruby-mouthed
and dirt-born, ready
to release my milky spores
in exchange for your touch.
I am meek cardinal sin
performing part woman,
part fungus. If my lips
were dull you would
not be tempted
by such a lovely pair.
You leak death
from every pore.
I seethe, an immortal
who lives under your feet.
Mass Extinction Virtues
I am grateful for a kumquat’s bitterness
packaged in colorful rinds, the tamarinds
and pepino melons displayed in rows
at the grocery store. And how, packed
into tanks at the aquarium, sharks trace
the glass as they circle, each staying
in their lane like track runners.
Once I read a news report that said
a female hammerhead attacked a male
who followed her too closely. She ripped
open his thick hide. I don’t remember
if he lived or died but someone
commented what a mess, all that blood
and frenzy. The neighborhood tom cat
wastes his slaughter, strewing eyeless
rabbits like unwrapped gifts on my lawn.
But the sanitation worker says I can’t keep
putting animal corpses in the trash,
and the landlord disapproves of anonymous
graves, so I recite a eulogy when I shovel
them into the ditch: passenger pigeon,
Tasmanian tiger, woolly mammoth,
our most iconic losses. After, as I sip
my coconut water imported thousands
of miles away in Thailand, I pretend
its nutrients will enrich my life.
The Body in Every Parallel Universe
My mother warned me, don’t lift too much weight.
No one likes a woman with muscle
yoked around her shoulders, stretching fabric,
another way for clothes not to fit, unflatter.
I am given an ultimatum: salvation in disappearing
or pseudoscience shame. When a friend confessed
she did not recognize me, I didn’t mistake
her surprise as a compliment. My trajectory
was brokered in pain, where every step I took
as a newly legged maiden in a cursed fairytale.
My wedding ring slipped off my fingers.
The doctors approved, and the men looked
like they might pinch my flesh as if testing
a cut of beef. They didn’t need permission
to see if I was bloody and rare, ready to eat.
[make believe]
You fabricate the narrative to flutter like silk, slip away.
Paper cutout dolls—easy to undress, perpetually surprised. Blushing at the sudden change, thrown away.
You are disposable. You embed into the earth like small, plastic beads that fill up the ocean.
You never wear the antique clear glass necklace your mother carefully restrings, placing the beads in the correct order.
You keep violets in your bedroom. One day you stop caring for them. What it is like to be tossed aside.
When someone enters without permission, you pretend that you are the sun, everywhere and poisonous.
How everyone was fooled by radium. Who wouldn’t want to be bioluminescent?
But you are trying to calculate cruelty. You won’t stop counting until every sin is accounted for.
The troll. The magic beanstalk. A fairy godmother. A fox clever with words.
You unmark the marker. Who else is counting to three, waving a wand to disappear.
The threat of cotton sheets. You conjure your own silence.
If the princess is left in another castle, how do you know that no one else is inside once the doors are locked?
Armor
Spinybacked orb weaver
I admire the orb weaver’s puzzling geometry,
her carapace sturdy as a crab shell,
the glamor in spines that would soften
underwater, where the dumbo octopus,
round as a pillow, appears to be harmless
exactly where the danger lies—
hypothermal vents billowing iron sulfide,
thunderheads gathering off the coastline.
Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things, a poetic biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, forthcoming 2020), and three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry International, and West Branch. She teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference.