I Want to Watch Something Undress
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maybe a tree or a beehive,or you in your navy suit,
which is the color of everything your bodyis thinking but not saying.
I want to work a forty-hour weekin the crooks of your elbows,
to stare into the eye of your zipperas it blinks, opens. All week,
anxiety has dragged me across the floorlike a garbage bag. I kept feeling
like the kind of person who dies firstin a B-rated horror film,
which is to say, God bless Lou Reedon vinyl. God bless the sound pants make
when they fall to the floor,the soft collapse like a champagne bottle
opened underwater. I want to bethe headlights on your bed sheets.
I want your gaze to become the dressI am wearing, then the one I am not. [End Page 228]
RUTH MADIEVSKY is the author of a poetry collection, Emergency Brake, which was named Tavern Books’ 2015 Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series selection and was released in February 2016. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She was a 2015 Tin House Scholar in Poetry. She is originally from Moldova and lives in Los Angeles, where she is a doctoral student at the USC School of Pharmacy.
