This month for Poetry 365 we’re featuring Kim Addonizio’s eclectic new book Mortal Trash. Filled with allusions to classic poets such as William Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, this seventh collection from the prolific National Book Award finalist mingles witty musings on lust and aging with weightier concerns about terrorism and global warming. Vivid, jaded, and linguistically agile, Mortal Trash shows why the San Francisco Chronicle described Addonizio as “a master of compressed intensity who always nails the emotional image.” So don’t miss this edgy new book, sample a poem below, and make sure to stop back next month for Poetry 365.
Internet Dating
I’m tired of kissing nematodes,
splitting the check with scorpions,
listening to the spiritual autobiographies of slugs
over an infinitely repeated series
of banal gestural codes.
I’m thinking of dating trees next.
We could just stand around all night together.
We could stand each other.
I’d murmur, they’d rustle, the wind
would, like, do its wind thing,
without speaking. I hate speech.
Shut up shut up shut up I thought
as he flicked his tongue at the Peruvian tapas,
but the spell didn’t work.
Get out of my inbox. I feel violated.
Not in a good way.
There’s no one I want to inhale into my alveoli
like I did with you. There, I just made you
into a cigarette. If only
I could press your burning head
into the arrow wound, and twist you, slowly,
to cauterize it. Instead
I want another you, and then another.
You, in the morning after coffee.
Postprandial you. You, especially when I’m drinking.
But back to dating: I don’t think I can.
If I read your profile online, I’d never write you.
But I miss all the sides of your face.
I miss the trees of your eyes.
I miss never licking the scar of your hand.
Last night I dreamed you came over
and stayed. If only I could buy
a little property in that dream
and not wake up sick
and freezing, endlessly hitting the return key.
