POUR, TEAR, CARVE

Fainting Couch

By Karen Leona Anderson 

—after Veleska Soares’ Fainting Couch, 2002.

My home is a fainting couch
but steel, punctured steel.  

To sit seems like rest but isn’t; 
it’s girl-furniture, between one thing

and the next, legs crossed and uncrossed,
awake and blacked out, desire 

and disgust. Full of stargazer lilies,
their rough pink tongues lolling

out; full of secret drawers.  Built
to cloy.  It doesn’t seem like work,

but it is, in fact, this bringing myself
to the brink of nausea with scent 

I said I loved.  To do it
means becoming stainless

steel, means perforating yourself, 
means remembering you can hold

anything inside your secret drawer,
rest inside the restlessness.

Karen Leona Anderson is the author of the poetry collections Receipt (Milkweed Editions) and Punish honey (Carolina Wren). Her work has most recently appeared in Pleiades, Little Star, Alaska Quarterly Review, ZYZZYVA, The Best American Poetry, and other journals and anthologies; her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Grant. She is a professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland.