a women

Vanessa Roveto

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781609387358
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

"To survive romantic love, the woman served the other woman desert dirt with shells as the truck stop receded into the distance"—so observes the mordantly detached voice of a women, an extravagantly pained, self-and-other-lacerating imaginative journey dedicated "to relationship." Auto-ethnographic postmortem on love, fragmented body floating through distillations of desire, sex, and death, lyric fever dream, avant-garde performance piece, manifesto of queer resistance, Vanessa Roveto's phantasmagorical second book is several contradictory states bound together in a single invented language, resembling but never quite identifying with our own.

Thirst Section

[in wood country we liked to wake up at noon]

in wood country we liked to wake up at noon in a leisurely way

making up Theorys of adult relationships, motivated by jealousy as

aromatherapy. lavender replaced leather. everyone was over their

dom for old times stake. i volunteered to separate the cockroaches

into groupings of scare culture and fake meat, our fear of the

anima and insects making it easy to enjoy the broad scope of flavor

profiles taken from palms. the odors came from equipment

this afternoon i woke up burning my face on a sadistic oversize

sofa, not knowing the location of my crumb muffin. the lukewarm

milk froth got flatter as it contemplated reducing itself to a We

Need. look into the mirror she said onto the mirror. this was a tourist

attraction

apparently these women were all related which is what i learned

when i went into the bathroom to take a picture of my stomach

we are starving to crop up

like pieces of dust caught on the rim

to prove a brief bio of each You

we hunted

[how many ghouls in her are oppressed]

how many ghouls in her are oppressed sources of resentment?

linens climb into bed to hide. at home my new girlfriend binds

herself to a sad telephone. i ask for her name but the machine

doesn’t answer

no memory of no

consistency from a deeper cause

can’t know its tendencies

later, her lips stuck to a sugary rim at a mountain dive bar, her

eyes left themselves to some other town. near the fireplace the

taxidermy deer offers 50 cents for her cheap sunglasses, signaling

how many years left she has to be unhappy

across the bar the olive relaxed its pimento into alcohol and was

impressed to the tooth. we found the lounging chair a dealer,

stuffing her deck. the painkilling sadness game was continued in

some fashion until all cards played the winning hand named jack.

loved ones get in his way in the walls of the restrooms 40 mirrors

substitute spine teacher

women of a certain age

angry teenagers

roaming murders of crows

a screaming earth

zen playmix, i ask

my former houseguest to lie down and die

[myopia was our utopia since]

myopia was our utopia since we were no one interspersed with

subservient communes that functioned like commas, punctuating

our lust chalet with rising waters. the vodka served tater tots,

the fireplace hood ornament a reminder of the death of folk. you

ordered ice cubes to chew-drown out the noise. the golden milk

fondled me

kindling wormwood through the screen

an outside ally will come into my ear

no body was just one anymore

the greasy menu got up delaminated

itself in the pyre

the fierce heart jumps you back to the elements. not like the mass

market, no date, an expiration without sweet teeth full of dirt. i

can’t stop thinking about naomis masturbation, kristins vomit

mountains, all the beads in petras sports bra. the dry forest air

headache ate away

skin and landscape in a trance

when laid together

the broken screen

[i can’t remember when my wine]

i can’t remember when my wineglass became conscious, screaming

into its own video. petra plugged in the phone to start a stilettos

sense of pleasure drives between you and me, between the shoe

fetish and the lumpen gaze, all class, even whips. resonances dis

covered in the jumps between posting about it and telling you how

i feel

room temperature smells and newspaper scraps collided. time

zoned out, a conversation involving activated grass. cocks roached,

the

wildwood faces compare me

but won’t leave me alone

i am never invited. smoked bears filling my holes, i end up buried in

honey as the bee dies in its glass

craving only a feeling

will hold you

now if you are sick i

am not two

climate changed. girl children showed up hungry and confused by

unedited foreign

desire without a trained ear

arms like battlefields

our flat feet stepping

i really did love

[what is difference if we’re all living]

what is difference if we’re all living in the same apartment

the dreambodies hero makes her way

past a fish crying for help

the ego is not a self-sustaining system. the tuna stalkings girl was

a dancer made of organs, bearing messages about a former dom.

my body has known many of them, this one was special. the lie was

the private part. all language gets her alterations in secret, women

opening oneself to rescue

i jump out of bed aware that i am suspended above skinless beings.

i hear the new young grass blanketing the outside, waiting. there

are so many bushes coming out of the drought. the gold chain is

forgetting bondage

so many objects of protection

words of power won’t need

i wanted to know it all better and more. to become one open-minded cunt

[on the class r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Parts One
• Idlewild Retreat
• Thirst Section
• Acknowledgments and Notes
• Series List