Three Poems by Jessie Wingate

Daytona Beach Babies

Ladies’ Night was Wednesday night.
I was a teen wearing the heat like charmeuse;

my rhinestone decolletage not far removed from 
games of Pretty Pretty Princess and Ring Pop richness.

How do fifteen years look,
all dressed up in patent anticipation?

Rappelling from windows like Rapunzel’s lust, two girls 
escaped plain homes to walk toward a sequined strip.

We waited outside Razzle’s, whispering 
Can I have your bracelet? to passersby,

pilfered paper wristbands to vouch for legal age. 
Men said yes, smiles laced with knowing.

We fixed our wrists in paper cuffs
sealed with bubble gum. Tits up for the bouncer.

Sheer surprise at entry. Flash of wrist to the bartender: 
I’ll have a Sex on the Beach, sunset-colored drink

with the naughty name that felt like power on my lips. 
We sat steps from the ocean. Shimmying silky pony hair

and laughing like chimps. Imping the cool girls,
the college girls, even them, barely skirting twenty-one.

Together we danced on go-go stages, hanging, 
small cages for the display of pretty birds like us.

We already knew how to move, how to grind 
our diamond belt buckles against the bars.

When we descended to the dancefloor, a ballroom if ever 
we’d known one, the men materialized in Marlboro clouds.

Our lips tied in bows, we ribboned together for safety.
But each hip thrust, each sip of ether, pulled us a little looser

until we hung askance, stringy and stupid. We imagined 
it was us, holding the keys to the castles between our ears.

We didn’t know better, couldn’t yet grasp 
the jeweled boxes of women

whose hinges and clasps were broken and forced open. 
Force: hadn’t occurred to us yet,

children plumped on American Dreams, 
tender foie gras goslings.

When they crushed their dicks against us
and corseted us in touch; squeezing and rubbing,

churning and shoving, we wondered:
Is this love?

Married on the Eve of Destruction

The roses here are like pomegranate seeds,
ruthlessly carnal and hopelessly tinged

with the scent of the dead.
The soil they grow in is leaden, fungicide

paints each head. The flower smell is bred out 
in a hedge for longevity.

How did this bloom that wreaths collective 
memory in sparking thorn and throbbing petal

become mostly poison? Our apples 
have met a similar fate,

vitamins and minerals bolting
at downshot rates, revolting from the flush.

Calcium, Iron, Phosphate: 
Bone, Blood, Soft Tissue—

What greater issue? If the blocks are lost, 
how will our bodies build?

After my vitals succumb, I will be spirit 
only, a scythe of the new moon.

So much has already been cut away
from my crooning fingers, which reach to grasp

a meager scrap of fragrance, flavor, feeling.
To hold those things like a yawn before thick sleep.

When I go under, my wraith will rake the leaves 
of you, unearth the time we ate apple crumble

hiding in the thicket of my grandmother’s rose 
bushes, that walled-up garden where the thorns

cut my back and your knees and nothing bloomed 
but us, despite the stoniest winter.

Sufficient to Destroy a Man

Behind the Manna of St. Nicholas 
she veiled a means of escape
brought by belladonna,
a clear champion of beautiful women 
(and aren’t we all beautiful)
pressed into a bottle, for ugly skin 
(and aren’t we all ugly).

For their cheeks that bloomed with 
bruises, nebulae forewarning the birth 
and death of stars, rouged with an 
atmosphere of long-waves and shaking 
with volcanic activity, molten in rivers 
and canyons cracked between their ribs.

These women knew the different
kinds of burn: spark, rage, smolder, rain. 
Degrees of damage done by ravaging, 
ravishing lips in red, their words lined in 
the color of blood. The head bleeds so 
much, the mouth heals so fast. The throat 
is always covered when in public. The back 
of the neck exposed when in the home.

Guiliana T. made a pretty bottle, named
for her sake, Aqua Tofana (Storm Water). 
Would it soothe the skin and disappear
the damage? Or could it make the water rise, 
take them to that deep and sleeping place, 
the foam lapping their lips, the sky’s
eyes closing—finally offering the rest— 
with which the moondrunk night is blessed.