Leslie Anne Mcilroy
Small Business Advertising

Copy • Design • Production
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Dismember

Good lord, this isn’t wax! This is a human hand!
Tales from the Crypt, No 25.

It’s not the blood, it’s the separation, the part
of a whole left to crawl across the floor
looking for its body. It’s the foot
used as a doorstop, the arm holding up
a lampshade, the head in bed with the small man
who strokes its fine hair and whispers
love notes in its shriveling ear. It’s the storing
of limbs in the freezer, the old woman
rocking, humming and chewing a hand.

It’s the cries of men—no morphine, no arm.
The empty pant leg blowing in the wind,
the basket of parts. It’s the phantom tingling
below the joint and the rub of the stump
and its round, raw skin. It’s the grainy
video scream as the hooded captor saws
at the neck "Allahu Akbar!” God is great.
It’s the 12 year olds with machetes,
crossing the Sudan, hacking. It’s the look
of shock on the decapitated face.
It’s the twitching.

It’s the girl losing some part of herself right now
in an explosion, a rape, a gangrenous disease.
It’s the boy burying what’s left. It’s Rich
being fitted with a plastic prosthetic,
picturing his lover caressing the stub.
It’s the author writing a best-selling thriller
about a killer who collects clits in a butterfly box,
the butcher who grinds fresh meat, the nanny
who pays good money for a soup bone.



Whore Universe

I don’t want talk anymore, your choked, throaty whisper
in the dark alley, my skirt pulled up, bare assed

against the stone as your/my moans rise up on
the mortar, shadows passing, gaggle of diners,

tongue like a slow knife against my neck.
Forget your fantasies: that girl in the nippled

tid-bit, dancing finger-like behind the diner,
the hard rock of yourself finding its home between

my legs, rigid man want. Quit dreaming so loud,
stupid head of desire, lost boys from yesterday

entering so deep I wake cumming—back arched—
cunt wet and telling. What I want now

is some marvel of modesty, to transform
this heave-ho dirty-slut girl—mother/sister/

daughter/lover—full and round like heaven,
solid and silent as prayer, blessed

and abandoned like that star fleeing the galaxy
into a light of its sorry own.



Heart Time

For days now, I’ve been hearing my heart beat.
In my dreams, in the city wind, on the radio.

I’ve been counting up and down in the back of my brain.
Adding and subtracting like an insistent abacus,

the disks clicking their restless, wooden bodies together
through the night and into the morning, stirring

coffee six times round, then seven, then eight.
It’s come to me that I can measure beauty this way,

by counting my presence in this final world.
I can calculate how much it matters to appreciate

the sun; to walk home with a barrette from your daughter’s
hair in your pocket, reminding you of time, soft skin,

of the first kiss and its pulse, the throb of thunder
in the sky timed exactingly before the lightning.

And with each beat, I draw further away from myself,
and into the lovely dance of dying, knowing only

that as it stops, I will hear nothing but your voice,
telling me that the silence is full, the sky, quiet.

"Rare Space is a stunning collection of poems, daring, taut, sexually alive, and politically astute. A myriad of familiar themes becomes incandescent under her unflinching gaze. We’re invited to look closely at family, sex, race, physical disability, psychic pain and what it is to be a young American woman at the beginning of a new century facing down old ills like racism, classism and misogyny armed with little more than a laptop and an indomitable will. Rare Space is new American poetry at its absolute best."
—Sapphire