After Hera Lindsay Bird

After Bernadette Mayer
Note:

In the 1980s, Bernadette Mayer instructed:

 “Write the poem: Ways of Making Love. List them.”

In 2016, Hera Lindsay Bird published ‘Ways of Making Love after Bernadette Mayer’.

Back in the 1980s, Mayer instructed:

 “Rewrite someone else’s writing. Experiment with theft and plagiarism.”

In 2021, I re-write Bird’s ‘Ways of Making Love after Bernadette Mayer’ (2016), as

‘Ways of Making Dinner after Hera Lindsay Bird after Bernadette Mayer’.
I insert myself into a game between two writers.

Uninvited, but hopefully not unwelcome, I play.

As if we all knew the rules from the beginning.

As one blade sharpens another blade.

As two frozen chicken thighs defrost in the silvery corners of a kitchen sink.

Lonely krill find their home in the belly of a whale.

So tiny we lose sight of them, retracting our telescopes

in the jowls of a decaying beast.
You are chewing gum, and I am the world’s deepest hunger.

I am an elaborate silver service and you are Antiques Roadshow,

estimating my price.

You invite the crowd to dine, insisting they lick the metallic crevasses of residual dust.
Chocolate soil spills across a garden bed.

Pumpkin tendrils coil, binding our wrists to our ankles.
It’s like watching the Food Channel while nauseated

or a hairdryer rising dough.

Like caterpillars at Yum Cha, going hungry due to their limited dexterity.
Native bees gather around your cactus thumbs.

I open my hand, like a stop-motion droplet bursting on impact.
I want you in a Roman vomitorium, expressing everything you’ve ingested into

sacred vessels of Western material culture.

In the labyrinthine pantry

of The Louvre.

In the depths of fermenting kimchi, our skin tingling with probiotic bacteria.

In the cold aisles of a pillaged supermarket

because writing poetry about eating together

when you could be writing poetry about fucking

is sad comfort for the insatiable.

It’s like baking a sponge cake from rubber.

It’s like sucking the marrow from an anaemic ox’s tail.

It’s like studying to become a veterinarian surgeon for eight years

so you can gorge on animal feed

absorbing the nutritional iron of livestock

before eating the livestock,

knowing you did everything in your power to suck the marrow from their existence.

But love isn’t calculated malpractice

no matter what this poem would have you believe.

The years bleach eggshells degrading into compost

embraces unfurl like petals in a too dry summer

and here we are sitting down to dinner

as if we had never done so before.