Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
Give me the lover who yanks open the door
of his house and presses me to the wall
in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I’m drenched
and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
and begin their delicious diaspora
through the cities and small towns of my body.
To hell with the saints, with martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
I want this world. I want to walk into
the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
like I’m nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
and I want to resist it. I want to go
staggering and flailing my way
through the bars and back rooms,
through the gleaming hotels and weedy
lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
where dogs are let off their leashes
in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
other and roll together in the grass, I want to
lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again
and put on that little black dress and wait
for you, yes you, to come over here
and get down on your knees and tell me
just how fucking good I look.

-Kim Addonizio

Bent over a black pot on an outdoor stove
a woman lifts bread
dripping from the oil with a stick and calls

for more Cokes from the house.
We drift among the booths
where families sit with quilts

and pots, carved turtles and tiny katsinas.
The sky’s white, the heat like cotton batting.
A lone carnival ride revolves,

empty cars bolted to a steel rod.
Whatever we came for, it isn’t this sad, dusty field
or the trays of turquoise rings and bracelets,

the same we’ve seen in every trading post
along the way. Why not admit
there’s no place our love will be easy again,

however far we drive into the mountains;
why not say it here, where the air
is heavy with flies, where nothing is trying

very hard to be graceful
or even kind. But maybe it is kindness, after all
that keeps us from talking; we walk side by side,

tear the soft bread in two and share it.
Up the hill are the private houses of the pueblo.
At the half-built church

you stop to snap a picture
of the finished arch, the piled adobe bricks,
a place our friends will later take for ruins.

-Kim Addonizio

Marc says the suffering that we don’t see
still makes a sort of a sound—a subtle, soft
noise, nothing like the cries of screams that we
might think of—more the slight scrape of a hat doffed
by a quiet man, ignored as he stands back
to let a lovely woman pass, her dress
just brushing his coat. Or else it’s like a crack
in an old foundation, slowly widening, the stress
and slippage going on unnoticed by
the family upstairs, the daughter leaving
for a date, her mother’s resigned sigh
when she sees her. It’s like the heaving
of a stone into a lake, before it drops.
It’s shy, it’s barely there. It never stops.