Christine Butterworth-McDermott
Featured Poet
False Jasmine
Think honey.
Think suckle.
They say if you dream
of such blooms, it spells
good fortune in love
but what yellow
jasmine promises
(sweet sweet nectar)—
it cannot provide,
turning toxic
the minute tongue
touches stamen.
Any honeybee
that lingers here,
corbiculae coated
in dusty pollen,
meets confusion,
double vision,
carries brood death
to the hive. We
have died sucking
these tubes of plenty.
Why, is it when
you anther up, I part
my lips every time?
Puffing Up in the Apiary,
you say, “You’re a smacked beehive,” a gibe
to disguise your own bad behavior, to hypnotize
me with blown smoke. Let me apologize,
but I’m not close to closing my eyes or excusing you.
Biting remarks skew or screw, right through
the center. It’s true you only love this honey
when it’s packed in pretty glass jars tied
with gingham ribbon. Any buzzing is betrayal
to you, even if bee is just being bee.
In your smacked up self-centered language
bee is wasp is hornet is yellow jacket
so, let me see if I can put this in brackets,
for you, you don’t need to shake [your racket]
at me to prove your ownership. Combing through
it all, down to the waxy bone, what’s clear,
what’s honed, is you’re no one I need call keeper.
Amanita
Destroying angel,
you look so familiar and benign
that one brings you
in with all
the common fungi
never noticing
that subtle difference
created by the membrane
covering
your skin’s hide like an egg.
There now, volva—
left over at the base
of everything,
you broke the universal
veil in your upward
growth. Volva is also
a genus of sea snail
though that’s not
relevant here
except to say you too are
a slug shaped
like a bullet
that rends the heart.
Aconite
The curry killer killed her lover
lacing dinner with poison
What part of her was howling
feed the wolf?
How loud it must have been to fly
to another continent and purchase
bikh, aconitum ferox
to fit her ferocity.
Did she think
feed that wolf
and his new bitch younger & prettier
and not me, not me, not me?
Did she think about how conscious
he’d be, no one to save him
and his future bride, just a sister
dialing 999 too late?
Did he, in those last searing moments,
figure out how she let herself
in with the old key and regret
not changing the locks?
Did he wonder how—dizzy with betrayal,
she didn’t once think
of her own husband dying of cancer,
her children? Feed the wolf.
Did he realize how the agile fingers
that once passionately stroked his abdomen,
dusted the wolfsbane onto the curry?
How she howled from scorn feed feed feed
as she sprinkled, thinking
how he wounded her after sixteen years,
she should have known he should have known
how cornered dogs bite,
how beewolves sting.
Thoughts on Your Unweaving Me As “The Unicorn in Captivity”
How could you so easily unravel this warp and weft?
The thread is pulled again as you wander past my door,
the last time. Gone is the horn of the unicorn, the forest floor
peppered in blossom. Gone tree, gone fruit. Once you
said you’d lay me down on a bed of red rose petals.
Cliché fenced me in. Abandoned, petals dried to particle,
crushed dust and so it goes, the sleek white body of every animal,
the unspooled past, dissolving tapestry. You glance at me,
then shut your eyes, your tell to a now boarded door. Goodbye,
goodbye. The hooves are disappearing, Goodbye body that
shall love no more. Now the edge. Watch the thread
fall to the floor.
