< Back to Issue 3.5 Contents

[Poetry]
ALL THIS DIRTY LAUNDRY
 by Danny Penny

In between taxis on Madison Avenue,
            the Heat is on you
like a Great Dane,
            licking your calves with a truck exhaust tongue,
resting his paws on your shoulders.

At night you sit naked, hunched over the toilet,
listening to soap bubbles in the sink
                        crackle like fireworks miles off.

Forget to flush;
flakes of paper in the bowl
a morning reminder--
            a clue. You’ll wonder if
somebody else
            slept on the cool side of the bed,

and go skittering barefoot
            from the bathroom
                        across the hardwood, run
tremulous fingers over soggy duvet,
press nose into pillowcase.

What are you snuffling for:
a copper curlicue in this electric blue?
            Snake it up your nostril
hoping for whiffs of green
            curry and green lakes and sweaty teenage pussy.

But it’s been years since that
            desperate August—the dog days
when your sweetheart’s beagle with the Hebrew
name and the goiter keeled
            over by the pool—and who can smell
            anything but themselves
            in all this dirty laundry?

  

PORCH GAZEL

The porch has turned to splinters—it smiles gap-toothed
at the gloam. The rosebush is a conflagration.

We just sway on the porch swing, chewing fistfuls of cherries, spit
the pits on the lawn. Listen to the house moan in heat.

The doors are swollen like mother’s ankles,
like uncle’s gut, like big brother’s head.

And the mosquitos have been busy for the rain; air thick with
lazy drones so fat they fight to float like old balloons. On your arm,

there’s a bloated sucker, hairy derrick pumping. Don’t talk to me
about citronella with your blood sloshing in its belly.

  

  

Danny Penny is an MFA candidate at Columbia University. He is the winner of the 2012 Norton Writer's Prize, the 2013 Lorabel Richardson American Academy of Poets Prize, and the 2013 Selden Whitcomb Prize in poetry. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere. 

< Previous 
Back to Issues