’s tattoo flares as they fly from guitar to keyboard to pedal pumps to re- peat a phrase falling out of sync with what they’ve laid down, body a whirl- ing dervish of tensions caught and released and when I catch enough of what’s written on their arm I find the arabic يكون في سلام، لا في القطع means be in peace not in pieces and I am and they are and we are all these notes and singing shored against ruin
Universal Bodies
My student wants to show me her new tattoos, so she’s band- aided her nipples and proceeds to hoist up her shirt, and there— exploding around each aureole— are the sun and moon. Solar flares arc, and the orgasmic orb pulses, Rothko-like, reddening as it nears the core. The moon modulates through softer shades, blue-tinged craggy surface is mapped with pock-marks, grayed with craters. The art’s mad-good, observatory accurate, and when I fawn over the work she says Janey took hours on each—that she’s going pro. I picture these paired spheres in a lover’s hands or mouth, imagine she cups their miracles in her palms. I imagine the baby she might invite into this world, and wonder what it’ll imbibe as it milk-sucks, hand groping for the next in line—cool stone of one hemisphere, flaring furnace of the other. I’m a child again, wanting to press into flesh, to be milk-drunk and careless, to return to when my mother was the universe.
David Allen Sullivan is the former poet laureate of Santa Cruz county, California. His books include Strong-Armed Angels, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a book of co-translation with Abbas Kadhim from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet, and Black Ice. He won the Mary Ballard Chapbook poetry prize for Take Wing, and Tim Seibles selected Black Butterflies Over Baghdad for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection (Word Works Books). He co-authored two books of poems, Salt Pruning and Everything I Touch Is—and Isn’t—You, with Ignatius Valentine Aloysius. An anthology, Magpie on the Gallows: Poems on Bosch and Bruegel’s Art, co-edited with his art historian mother, was recently published, and Light Thief, a book of poems and co-translations addressing his mother’s death, will be published by Glass Lyre Press. He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students. https://dasulliv1.wixsite.com/website-1.
