Miss Peach Gets Lucky

structureandstyle:

So I had a date with this werewolf. I said I’d give him
a Tuesday dinner slot if he got all his tangles out. After all that

conditioner, he did feel greasy,
but no worse than your average guy
by late Sunday afternoon. And we’re supposed to feel sorry

for the frothing one. He’s a bleeding wild flower,
a sock that would scratch you raw and doesn’t even have a match.
He’s got basic desires that lack a corresponding orifice.

And we’re a kind people.
We thank our monsters for letting us invent them. They let us feel dignified

and unsutured by comparison. They’re the parts of ourselves
we pity only when they’re covered in fur, the parts
that never married, never caught a whiff
of their own species, never got out of the house without

severing some plump limb.
So I could’ve stayed home, but what is the heart
without a few sharp knives around?

I did take precautions. My dress looked as unlike a steak
or any sort of first-degree murder as possible, which meant, of course,
I was swirled like a cupcake.

I climbed into his mouth
not long after we set down to eat. The tables of people
looked like loose animals
through the bars of his teeth.

I didn’t say anything, I wanted to spare his feelings,
but I was disappointed when it didn’t hurt.

So now I work for him. My job is to have flesh,
and I’m fairly good at it. He’s president

of not ripping my head off. What worthwhile lover
couldn’t, though? Love is a fancy name
for giving someone without fangs the power to kill you.

In our bed I lie next to him and his spasmodic changes.
Our bed is a darkness in which we feel
instead of see the stars.

When I hear the fsssssst of his tiny hairs parting
and the wet rip of his claws starting to grow, I think, Hey,
which is sharper, teeth or lies,

teeth or lies, baby? The scary monster
is the back of the head, the face you thought you knew, gone,
turned away. Scream all you want to.

How many satisfying meals turn out to be poisonous?
When we love something, isn’t it as if we have grown hands

especially to hold it? What have we ever touched
and not had to watch turn ugly
by the light of some sort of moon?

—Catie Rosemurgy

I have a friend who dropped out of graduate school (MFA) for a million reasons I couldn’t presume to explain, but I do know she wanted to write beautiful, crazy poems like Catie Rosemurgy—in her own way. She used to tell me about reading Catie Rosemurgy’s (I can’t bear to call the author “Rosemurgy” because it’s so impersonal, and though we’ve never met, we are now personal to each other, the poet and the reader—so a full name will have to intimate the paradoxal boundaries of our relationship) persona poems about Miss Peach, and I don’t think I’d ever heard anything like them. The back of The Stranger Manual—which this poem is from—says Miss Peach is “an unpredictable, cartoonish shapeshifter, who emerges onto the page dragging the myth of the individual, various gender scripts, and the grand tradition of the poetic persona with her.” And I guess that’s about right.

How absurd is this poem? Very. “Miss Peach Gets Lucky” is insane and beautiful and somehow makes a metaphor about a werewolf work harder to talk about the monsters we create, the pain of love, and sex, sex, sex. Usually the words “heart” and “love” would make me cringe, but not here. Not when Miss Peach is getting lucky with a werewolf with tangles in his hair and only greasy conditioner as a fix. Not when she says, “I climbed into his mouth/not long after we set down to eat.” Somehow “love” and the “heart” don’t seem such big concepts; somehow they become only as real as that werewolf is. As Miss Peach asks, “What have we ever touched/and not had to watch turn ugly/by the light of some sort of moon?”

Does this make sense? I don’t know. If love exists as more than a concept, though, I love this poem.

-R

  “Love is a fancy name / for giving someone without fangs the power to kill you.”

don’t you just feel that, right down to the bone?