Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Sign Inventory, Week 11

Sign Inventory: "Pretty Hurts"  (Amy Pence)

Or so the technician says, wielding
her pearly injectibles in a syringe.

The Not-I travels down a parallel corridor
wearing her newly crafted features.

I dream the blad onion--astride
a wheelchair, my mother perches

in her rotting corpse. The Not-her
having had the facelift years ago at forty.

Post-stroke, her third husband drags
her along, because That's what Judy

would have wanted. I manufacture my mouth,
foxes startle--moisture rises from the grass.

We tend monuments to her pretty:
coy in the late 50s, her eyes limpid

beneath black netting, we grant all her wishes,
but too late--. A non-blooming mulberry

clings to its thousand secrets. Trees, gowned
by want--haunt us with the human.

  • author structures her poem around the stylistic form of couplets
  • author seems to create a relationship displacement between the protagonistic and another woman
  • narrator appears to be a state of mental and physical paralysis, in a sense sort of detached from displays of sentimentality and emotion.
  • poem conveys a sense of toxicity of shock and trauma that is so overbaring and domineering it becomes haunting
  • plays with the idea of how some women may tend to become obsessive with aesthetic ornamentation and artiface, jocularly making an effigy out of those rather superfuous obsessions

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