Absorption
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Absorption
The hyena’s thick neck, the terror— not the jaws, not even the crushing grin: a perversion: the teeth of such clowning.
I don’t want to see it take a strip of meat from that man’s mouth with its mouth as gently as a lover might but you are intrigued by the prospect of that kiss.
You cover my mouth when I try to tell you how the priest at Bet Giyorgis blessed me: he placed a pinch of red dirt on my tongue and I swallowed it against everything I know. I could not help but take it in. I thought of you.
Yes you have a dirty mouth you tell me and you tell me how beautiful
you find some Youtube vision: those fierce-necked creatures brought to sweetness you wanted me to see. [End Page 866]
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a National Book Award finalist, and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She teaches in the English Department at Cornell University.
