That’s how your pulpy sex undoes me—Deborah Digges

And this is how the scarlet macaw alights
at my kitchen window, National Bird

of Honduras—swooping in from a hot, wet
country most murderous. Squawking

like an engorged organ, a four-chambered heart,
squealing like a nerve pinched till it palsies

one side of a face, tomato dripping from lunch’s lips.
Squeaking over the measuring cups, the silverware,

this pumping, two-story muscle, with busy, brainless
burst; of a long plunge into a long-ago mouth,

where the tongues are littered with lilting harmless lies,
where the gums say lust, where the gizzard’s spritzed

to a brink-ish bliss, this bullhorn blossom belting out
a cardinal’s worth of sorrow, capacity to blurt. Most

crimson capillary of brake-lit streets, cocktail party
maraschino cherry seizure, all the neon up and down

Rainier: OPEN, BOSS, BUD. Beasty bloom, rasp of blush,
monkey’s rump, signature and siren, semaphoric salute.

It was all so 26,000 light years away, fuzzy like a crime scene,
then that aortic accuracy: overly-lipsticked, 50+ in ruby-

sequined heels, halo frayed, trumpets erect, come
strutting like some middle-aged lush going under

to be severed. Murder on the Marmoleum, all this pedaled,
sanguine evidence, this other-side-of-the-universe daughter

perplexed — asking why and how, asking will I be next.