• Home
  • Essays
  • Fiction & Poetry
  • Comics & Art
  • Shrapnel
  • About
Blunderbuss Magazine
Poems

Four Poems

By Katie Condon ·

After all, St. Catherine is my namesake

Because I have no food to give
I give the stray cat a quick scratch behind her ears
& now she won’t stop mewing for more on my windowsill.

Her green eyes are as wide as my own
the first time I moved aside my panties for a boy:

crowded in my car’s backseat, I wore a red dress
& smelled like the honey of my mother’s biblical Heaven!

God, my mother lectured, watches our every move: watched the boy
indelicately take my openings into his mouth,
pretending he knew exactly what to do.

I’m pretending I don’t hear that damn cat’s mew mew mew.
Imagine if I’d lost my virginity mewing!  

If anything I was bored,
waiting for God to tap on my windshield & praise me
for how selflessly I offered myself to the hungry.

 

Don’t Be Bitter, Baby!

“Each one of my breasts,” she cried, “is 3lbs
of pure gold
                         & if you don’t believe me, tough!”

She thinks the secret to possessing
beauty is to be nauseously overwrought about everything

& I hate to admit, occasionally she’s right:

sometimes the only way to solve my hunger is to scream
I have a vast lust for beef! as I drive through

                                                                                  McDonald’s at 3am

& sometimes wearing a boa to the supermarket
is the only cure for my sorrow.

She tells me I glitter
& brags that the guy she took home last night
              looked like George Clooney & God’s flower child.

The world isn’t ugly, she tells me, if you let it borrow your stilettos.
She giggles, “Don’t be bitter.
                                                           Eat lipstick. Sob onto your mirror.”

                & I do—

each tear ballooning the reflection of my grievances
falling red from my hypocritical mouth.

 

How to Know the Wildflowers

On YouPorn there is a girl getting fucked
in a field filled with wildflowers.

She doesn’t moan like the other porn stars
screwed from behind by plumbers & pool boys.

Quiet in my computer’s blue glow, she delivers
her body, bending willingly to his whims.

If she is the wind, he is a quavering thistle—
his thorns reaching out to cut her breasts

for no good reason. This is not the first time
I am drunk & crying watching free porn.

I touch my breast like that will remove his thorns.
Is it wrong to feel a hurt kind of beautiful?

Buckwheat. Honeysuckle. Swamp-rose-mallow.

 

Volatile Elegy

I left a very convincing suicide note in the chrysanthemums.
How I love pollen & my sticky fingers! 

Is being dead all fun & games?
This comet will sleep upon this park bench.

In my hair, tangled like the possibility of life elsewhere,
God places a flower.

3am & the North Star writhing. A mourning dove. A glassy eye.
The stars are what the dead get hard for.

Sometimes I love god, & sometimes I love geraniums.
Take it, the sorrow my mouth makes.

A flower for the lady who is so beautiful.
A lady for the ground that is so beautiful.

I hold my lust like a pool in my palm
(some honey for the dead) (some nectar for my God).

Tonight the stars will share my bed.

 

www.simplesharebuttons.comSHARE THIS POST
FacebookTwittertumblrEmail
Share Tweet

Katie Condon

Katie Condon was born in Connecticut and lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. Recently, her poems have appeared in H_NGM_N and the anthology Hallelujah for 50ft Women. Katie has been a work-study scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and has received fellowships from Inprint. She is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee and received her MFA from the University of Houston.

You Might Also Like

  • Poems

    Affirmation

  • Poems

    Utopia

  • Poems

    Flying United

Subscribe

Blunderbuss is going print! Subscriptions are available via our Patreon page:

patreon-button.png

Donate

Donate to Blunderbuss and help support up-and-coming writers & artists.

Keep up with Blunderbuss

Follow @BlunderbussMag
Follow on Tumblr
Follow on rss

Latest

  • In the Opposites’ World

  • The History of Bodies

  • Shots in the Dark

  • Rascal House Blues, Pt. IV

  • After Homecoming

Like us on Facebook

Latest Tweets

Tweets by @BlunderbussMag
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Submissions

ABOUT

We are Blunderbuss Magazine, a web magazine of arts, culture, and politics, an ordnance of fire and improvisation. What ties together these essays, stories, poems, photographs, comics, and other bits of aesthetic shrapnel is a common attitude of visceral humanism. We aim for earnest noise. We want to splash in the mud of lived experience, to battle for a radical empathy, and to provide a megaphone to howling assertions of human subjectivity.

MASTHEAD

  • Editor-in-Chief – Travis American
  • Managing – Niral Shah
  • Fiction – Sara Nović
  • Art Director – Yvonne Martinez
  • Poetry – Sam Ross
  • Art – Terence Trouillot
  • Comics – Ellis Rosen
  • Senior – Alex Howe
  • At Large – Kevin T.S. Tang
  • Pictures – Lauren E. Wool
  • Contributing – Meredith Fraser
  • Web – Hayley Thornton-Kennedy

Subscribe & Support

Blunderbuss has made the jump to print! Subscriptions are available via our Patreon page:

patreon-button.png



Donate to Blunderbuss and help support up-and-coming writers & artists:

SEARCH

© 2014 Blunderbuss Magazine. All rights reserved.