Rosebud Ben-Oni
from What Hangs on the Side of the Mouth
Savage the rain falling on this orchid shop in mongkok.
On great stone blocks, bound & staked,
Arcs of blushing indigo & red-veined
Tangerine. My mouth throbs.
Metallic harbor steam rises off our skin,
Fogging up humid & cold
January windows.
We stick to everything.
There’s no more space between.
There’s no price I’ll understand
For the little tiger orchid
Fanning
Long flaxen petals
From magenta-striped buds
Behind padlocked glass,
Potted in terra cotta
Upon golden dais.
My mouth throbs
When you ask how much
I think how much
Could it be.
We came from eight thousand miles away & sixteen
Hours without sleep. Taxied straightaway,
Your mother scrubbing the red stain
From my lips. Dark woolen dress pricking my skin.
Welts. Thorns. Turbulence
Tossing us around
A wasp-waist stall on the plane.
You wiped our faces with inadvisable water from its sink.
I jammed mascara in my eye & tried best to hide
The tears in my drugstore nylons
Between the choir’s funerary hymns,
As we rounded the glass casket,
Your uncle’s face
Open & blushing
Beneath the fog within
The glass, his lips slightly parted
His eyes open
His eyes open
Couldn’t sleep
We wandered the streets
All evening
All morning
The streets a gyre of grey fluorescence
& viridescent heat
There’s no more space between us
How much you ask how much do I think
Oh to put a price on what is rare
& native only to here
Behind lock & key
No export
No selling
No touching―
But this was not your uncle’s thinking.
You say you lost track of the times
He rounded north the taiga,
Loved
All its unwelcoming,
Its polar twilight & shifting ice.
How life is drawn from water.
How nature gets rid of the strong
& the weak.
How long would he stand here
Staring into the glass
Whispering
Of permafrost
& arctic foxes, what shadows
Lie beneath the amaranthine levels of sea.
Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a CantoMundo Fellow. She was a Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan, and a Horace Goldsmith Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of SOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013), a contributor to The Conversant, and an Editorial Advisor for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain, among others. She writes weekly for The Kenyon Review blog. Find her at 7TrainLove.org
Return to March 2017 Edition
Savage the rain falling on this orchid shop in mongkok.
On great stone blocks, bound & staked,
Arcs of blushing indigo & red-veined
Tangerine. My mouth throbs.
Metallic harbor steam rises off our skin,
Fogging up humid & cold
January windows.
We stick to everything.
There’s no more space between.
There’s no price I’ll understand
For the little tiger orchid
Fanning
Long flaxen petals
From magenta-striped buds
Behind padlocked glass,
Potted in terra cotta
Upon golden dais.
My mouth throbs
When you ask how much
I think how much
Could it be.
We came from eight thousand miles away & sixteen
Hours without sleep. Taxied straightaway,
Your mother scrubbing the red stain
From my lips. Dark woolen dress pricking my skin.
Welts. Thorns. Turbulence
Tossing us around
A wasp-waist stall on the plane.
You wiped our faces with inadvisable water from its sink.
I jammed mascara in my eye & tried best to hide
The tears in my drugstore nylons
Between the choir’s funerary hymns,
As we rounded the glass casket,
Your uncle’s face
Open & blushing
Beneath the fog within
The glass, his lips slightly parted
His eyes open
His eyes open
Couldn’t sleep
We wandered the streets
All evening
All morning
The streets a gyre of grey fluorescence
& viridescent heat
There’s no more space between us
How much you ask how much do I think
Oh to put a price on what is rare
& native only to here
Behind lock & key
No export
No selling
No touching―
But this was not your uncle’s thinking.
You say you lost track of the times
He rounded north the taiga,
Loved
All its unwelcoming,
Its polar twilight & shifting ice.
How life is drawn from water.
How nature gets rid of the strong
& the weak.
How long would he stand here
Staring into the glass
Whispering
Of permafrost
& arctic foxes, what shadows
Lie beneath the amaranthine levels of sea.
Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a CantoMundo Fellow. She was a Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan, and a Horace Goldsmith Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of SOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013), a contributor to The Conversant, and an Editorial Advisor for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain, among others. She writes weekly for The Kenyon Review blog. Find her at 7TrainLove.org
Return to March 2017 Edition