Danielle Pafunda resists the day’s terms even as she’s complicit in and bound to them, to carry them out. The children are calling that Playmobil cop Uncle Shootser, again. She’s taking unflattering pictures, no, she means just actual pictures of her navel while she reads Elisabeth Bronfen.

Your Conscript

by Danielle Pafunda

Get the fuck away from me. I’m sick and free.
I’ve puked my heart out and also my other organs.

My liver spills, my kidneys spilled, my blood
turns the color of a nuclear sunset and hums across

the spoiled garden path. I’ve been at these stones
with a shotgun. I’ve been nailing the doors shut.

In any event, I drowned your book in the river.
At the river, two large men grabbed my arms

and pinned me against a shipping container.
They tore your words out of my throat and held them

in the pink arc cast by a security light. Give him up
they told me, and I did. Over and over again

retching into their outstretched sack, retching
money and grief and the look of your hair

plastered down by an oily rain.

When I first ate that rat after I first regurgitated that rat (see Johannes) and wouldn’t you know that rat was high on cocaine and babies (see Scientific American January 2006) I had the tongue of a songbird stitched into my tongue (see Chelsea Biondolillo, see Katrina Van Gouw, see Philomela). A blank spot on my tongue. A salt scar on my tongue. I only speak English. I make a high-pitched whinny at which babies coo (see babies). I can identify tone. You have your search terms.

note: I’ve started this feature up as a kind of homage and alternative (a companion series, if you will) to the incredible work Alex Dimitrov and the rest of the team at the The Academy of American Poets are doing. I mean it’s astonishing how they are able to get masterpieces of such stature out to the masses on an almost daily basis. But, some poems, though formidable in their own right, aren’t quite right for that pantheon. And, so I’m planning on bridging the gap. A kind of complementary series. Enjoy!