If God Was A Woman by Emily Nelson by Mac Vogt

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If God Was A Woman by Emily Nelson with an introduction by Mac Vogt

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Introduction For several years now I’ve read and studied Emily Nelson’s brutal poetry. I’ve likely read more poems by Emily Nelson than any other poet. And it could be said fairly due to her I’ve acquired a general practice of analysis adaptable to other types of challenging, less-thanaccessible text. For I was always attempting to figure her poems out. And I was always failing. I’ve got a belief that you ought to give a poet an articulation of the experience, but her muscular surreal technique bristles when you corner it. You may find it’s like bull riding. The metaphorical extensions buck and throw the intellect right out of the gate. For most of those years, her motifs swirled around me as like an obscure, turbulent parachute. To read was to drown in masterpiece. Attention is a magical thing, isn’t it? Most tastes can be acquired through a simple opening. You become proud. You see it special. We dream at the world far more quickly and deeply than most realize, and it is back there Emily Nelson’s poems reside. As she has insisted on the virtues of an instinctual, stream-of-thought writing process does she warn against the degradation of the after-the-fact edit, the overworking mistake, the intellect. She chatters, she seethes, growling she whips long deadly chords against rationality as but one of her targets. Correspondingly, her work has offered a tremendous resistance to any overarching organizational principle to sequence her work into something humble. A small chapbook, for instance. I’ve tried many times to compile them for her. And I was always failing. But now I believe I’ve earned an ear for how it could be done. All those years of puzzled, stretched out readings, of breaking down each line into its particular functions, trying to hold it all together as what I thought to be poetry has grown in her work buddings. Attention is a magical thing. I feel they are finally opening to me. Though they may seem to the initial reader as tremendously, brutally closed, to the point I recently sensed, beginning with her first poem IF GOD WAS A WOMAN in this sequence which as of this introduction was uploaded onto Youtube yesterday (the third time I had heard her actual reading voice) there was a fresh possibility to frame it all as a two-fold inversion of God: of his Light, and of his Sex. We can see then the chaos, the dread, the dirt and vermin and body horror, the drugs, the Oedipal nightmare and the dream organizing autopoietically without any after-the-fact senselessness by virtue of the opening poem. Out the gate, the beast must burst! Situated thusly her flow, her overflow, can then be intuited as canopy of the grand, tectonic, theological forces of culture and the inner life then turned inside out. While others might mouth ‘lean in’ bloodlessly of baa, Emily Nelson hurdles into the noumenal horror and claims alterity like reins these bulging veins orchestral ropes charged by an undead Zeus stripped of his skin and balls and banished to the netherworld that Eden was. A womb is dark, no? A womb is deadly. The following sixteen poems have been lightly edited and arranged so her reader may ease into a longer format stay about her night. For the relief of the untrained reader, the poems have been alternatively broken up with enjambment inspired by the sensibility of her recorded readings. And one final tip! Though Emily Nelson’s world refuses on principle easy access, you may find her work responsive to an application of integrity and willingness to bear the fruits of her labor. Bear them as she has! Without further ado. -- Mac Vogt

If God Was A Woman by Emily Nelson

IF GOD WAS A WOMAN If God was a woman he would be a whore with red pigtails legs like scissors opened for air and a bloody skirt only a wolf would hunger for. Her platform shoes red! Their murderous twist on concrete red! God in red without a penis in the wind but stoning men to death after sex. All whores are born with delicate bodies like God's fist and God is a woman giving traffic tickets after midnight. How heaven would be rich if one redheaded whore collected dollars by the swinging legs like the wings of a swan. Cutting! Cutting! The bells hanging too low too loud for the mighty celestial throne. Waiting like a cardinal for its worm a blooming crotch like a red amaryllis gives the harlot rumours of heaven flies will swarm between her thighs for God's scent. No one smells like a woman taste like a woman no one wears perfume like a red rose but a woman can forsake a man of faith like God and a john is a Jesus. You can't lie to God especially in her red attire you can't cheat her at poker or betray her. You can't murder God this woman for hire will steal a man's gun weepy and breathless go home with a prophet the whore herself reborn. When you hold me like a wounded dove remember who I am. When you spit at me like at a wet rat remember who I am. I am the centerpiece on your table on Sundays. Sunny side up at breakfast flat on my back when you pray to me. A whore has a father herself a whore has a mother herself. God doesn't cry to sleep. Jesus does and Africa is Jesus. God no longer plays golf drink wine and disowns. I am a tsunami. A lifetime of summoning love by the spoonful the likely drug getting me to heaven eyes shut.

CUPID O hunger it plays me like a fiddle pretends to be what it is not to watch me sated. Cupid sucking at my breast luminous as a star is a liar like all bright things in the dark bringing more tragedies than the Great Plague. My hunger is love and his to wound to plunder while I sit half-naked in a stranger's bed with my doll face I stole from a virgin. Such bitch does own her game of darling you! Innocent as moss dressed to kill with a princess cut gem on her ring finger. Think of me as the wolf I digested earlier in your doll house. A tramp who matters more to men and women hate because I am them! Lepers always need a martyr a sister madder than what their husbands' money burns. Fat winged pinkish little piglet Cupid lies in my arms with his arrow near my heart as I am in hebetude he plots a murderous affair. I'd be better off running a marathon in the parking lot dangling the sordid little angel curled up like a snow ball. My hunger the fleshy bait always on key when he sings to those in need of a quick fuck among the roses is my torment my Auschwitz. I own the night and its paraphernalia as he speaks with gilded words in your rooms of deception. I provide the toes and fingers while the tongue flutters like a butterfly. Cupid is the master of my hidden malady. My body my double his arrow my cunt say buttercup I'll make you my stallion riding to the slaughter.

SLEEPING ON THE CROSS The narcissist is a clever martyr she'll kill the cat for sheer pleasure to see its blood on her powdery hands. If a man wonderful with fingers rummages through the one hundred layers of her dress she'll cut one overzealous finger with her razor feigning an aloof faint at the sight of blood. This woman is a fox in the chicken coop preying upon the dumb rooster while she plays to him fiddle me. Embrace her she'll swoon pass out from boredom pretending crucifixion. When she comes up for the kill with a steak knife it is with great suffering. Thighs ajar as if her drafty spot needed a little chill that spot that room of death is as crazy as a loon. Skin stuck like a thin wallpaper to her bones she eats crumbs from the hands of lepers. Narcissist nymphomaniac by night a kind of sexless island starving herself until pale as a foggy moon blood rises to her lips neat for a kiss. Slam those lips on hers the man will knock against her pearly white die like Jesus. It is her story that is immortal and the sun doesn't care to shine her way she radiates like an invalid. Love isn't part of the bargain but it might transform her into a Gorgon if she stares into a man's pupils. Be the food! Be the mood! Be the thought that kills! She always has a leaky eye as obscene as her womb catapulting newborns into the air until they land fatherless in front of piano lessons ten years later. She will evade pretend and leave the story a bit more ruthless. She is the great deceiver the paradigm of persecution sleeping on the cross.

NEVER You came to me with fingers and toes and a heart the size of Africa the never-ending machine of famine. But the carriage is full with the widow and her child of sorrows it has no more room. To give you a jug of hearts never never the moon is full it has no more room. I am here carried off to my death place logging in this child born of a womb that will never see the light. Murdering crows are just formalities of air and space I live in between unbalanced and mad with trees. I am the murdering knife I pulled from between my shoulders. The child licks it clean. I have wondered why so many paths lead to my secret place between my thighs. Why the carousel still spins in my head with its dead bird flying backwards straight into the trees. Loaded up into the carriage on the day of the dead my child against my breast how much torment can she turn into festivities. What we share is a sort of god of stone pure as black ice. Will she be this flesh that men will house in their dreams? Will she be like me the long rope and noose around the bait? The self the house of bones the private place plundered the river red until it burst. Come on mouth hands tongue my dove of ink. Come on wildness wearing black and the queen I tied you to. Man of vowels illiterates derelicts beggars of the glass slipper. Never again these fables loaded like a gun. Never again the mother's song the child's song the whore bedded-down the needle the stuff that made me free offered in impunity. I shall carry my bed my pet my leash my barbed wire crotch the god inside the child who can barely name herself. I shall carry them all to that never place dig up their hearts bury the spleen in that cold earth.

ODE TO SUICIDE Death is not pleased with me through the mirror of the jagged little pill stuck inside my throat digging a coffin of words. You speak to me of suicide as if razors those steely birds could mother me but I reply suicide isn't a mother serving high tea or the little sisters with their prayers written in the blood of whores. It is my life to give away like a sorcerer its magic tricks. It is my life to kick its dumb-ass smile. And please do not speak of narcissism as if I should change my face each day to please you. I need not to speak of the old dog that drags itself to the grave of his young master. I am bound to its leash and you are not invited. Some people choke on their own vomit while sleeping the heroin dream. I will be awake like a lighthouse when I'll choose to feed those ravenous metal birds and you scavengers will pick my bones clean. I am only the servant of these prophets playing musical sinks. No one slash their wrists in the kitchen sink it isn't proper etiquette. The bathroom's sink white as snow welcome the last urge to keep face with death. Neat clean and hardly the spot for misused last words. No one ever asked why Antonin Artaud commited suicide. Everyone knew he was mad. The mad prolifer like red ants into the fire. The mad is always the answer to peel off life from its sullied shell. Youth the consort to suicide rips the eyes from their sockets the eardrums from the sound of bells. Why don't you listen to the ocean inside a seashell where the great white whale rides the wave. And I the siren sings to the sailors riding my flesh. I am in need of shedding my blood shape-shifting into a virgin like into a comatose woman with her pale lips inviting the kiss. I will not be born twice again for the audience but die of my bird death soft without the word love the leech.

MYTHOS Grief is a mystery more powerful than loss. Exiled from playing musical beds from the dust of mattresses breathing the scent of blood I took cover in the leather of the wound. I undid my skin I undid my breasts I left you my crotch under a glass globe for a souvenir. By November the cold set in between my thighs in the death market. I ripped the calendar terrible element ran blindfolded into the woods. Slept one thousand nights in a bears' cave ascended into myth. After harvesting the dead deer's heart spleen liver and bowels I cut myself a new pair of legs more sensible than rebuilding thighs from the whore I was so indelicately bruised. In the book of psalms hidden between the letters of the word love Jesus had married his death. I married my own resurrected half-woman half-deer. In my new gold skin I inhaled the smell of grief. No one dies without impunities in the world of concrete. In the green world loss is as smooth and as transparent as glass. I cut my wrists bled on the deer's carcass like a gift. Birds' wings stiffen in the chill of the wind behind the glass broke. Mushrooms grew tall like the Tower of Babel inside its iron cage the word loss trapped in confusion of its outcry. In the blood box of my heart there was a blade and a bullet breathing the sullied words from the dead. Jesus God's bastard sang through them the murder of flies. Deer me the new Pied Piper with all the renegades from the city behind me into moss where death cut them blind. Deer me undoing death in a flute's speech.

ALL MY WORDLY POSSESSIONS Yesterday I travelled from my lips to my feet and saw only a road of uncleanliness. One day I'll forget my voice play their game and float in my blood inside the eyes of a stranger. But this morning I packed all my worldly possessions shrunk where lovers flourish slashed my wrist and because I am not greedy slashed the other walked out the door of forbidden crimes. I slithered by those who overlook me and relish in the fact they are only aborted geniuses. Poetry only raises its arm to the born illiterate and I strike matches in their hair. I had a mother I had a father both were thieves. I had a boyfriend his body half into death mine nearly there smooth as a steel needle. All those darlings dwarves! And I with the red hook of pain into my vagina like into the Artic. The weight of clean sheets on my back as if God spat on them got rid of the obscene inspirations that sullied them. I licked my mother's Crucifix inhale the opium of forgetfulness jabbed my vein casting a cold eye on all these darlings taking a trip in the asylum for the blind. No one ever wakes-up from sleeping on beds that betray the soul and if so they become Judas. Those are the terrible fields of ugliness. I believe I'll burn first my strange heart as bait for oblivion. Now that I am gone I contain myself whole inside a pod without love asking insipid questions. There is a new doctor in purgatory hungry for raw meat. Even if I am a rebellious patient his jaw full of white teeth gets me ahead of myself. No need to cut off my ear yet get drunk or high on washing detergent. I am on the Kool aid diet I have disposed of all of my good manners and you don't have to kiss my wrists. Perfection is not against diseases but against understanding.

DEARLY DEPARTED Courting the dead I am not lungless appeasing the shut wood shut mouth shut eyelids. What goes on underneath that parchment skin? Eyes like sheep and pupils of a snake. Sanity surely doesn't sleep there! It only pretends to. The one crazy as a June bug keeper of the writ is lit like an elephant's tusk. I ain't gullible for love your daughter's trapped in your throat. I can't get it out of mind how she still won't sleep. I guess the meek never do. Mozart in the courtyard some exhibits need silk wax smiles and plenty of white like aspirin. Brimmed hats scarves to strangle sparrows pleated skirts wives' length deep in the mud. The living aspire to higher tunes while the dead blows kisses like ripe plums out of sheer boredom. A clarinet concerto Mozart like a stupid humanist. Need a song for the dearly departed go grab the worms in my crotch while Mother's fingers play fiddle with her cobwebs. You'd do the same if you couldâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; a Nazi salute to the rhetoric of hatred while love cowers away like a white rabbit between her legs. Take me whoring nightly flogging the zoo in prayers and weepings. It's alright I am only the anesthetist needle in hand for that cream-white to sing its own deathly ceremony. I am the true shepherd who serves the poison to the guests and pisses on the pews. Still I sing! Sing! It rhymes with prison and Mozart dug himself out his grave to piss on the carnival. No funeral is complete without a genius who still won't sleep.

VIOLENCE IS MY DARK ART To avoid death I have to commit murder. But first I have to break all the teacups silver spoons and the tiny copper bell from Mother's stiff fingers. Pull the knife from my back give her a Caesarean and like a dark bird fly into her obscene womb. Dead is dead but she still breathes with her uterus. Body of sod body of arsenic body of Christ she ate each Sunday. I am nailed to her cross crucified by my wings like a bird. What kind of myth would I be born into murdering the murderer. I'd be the dreamdaughter polishing up the stars. Crimson dark as a birth the dead spit with tar I am like a miner in her womb's deep pit looking for a way to escape the iron bars of slavery. I can always call my lover the hangman to empty out the lie like a small pollen. The man loves his rope around my neck I love the blooming pain airborne. Dark mother! Dark lover! Who sings the best in a body of hay after I lit it up with my ten fingers. What then man can you bring to death from your distant island? A bedroom of murders a sofa of murders a chair up side-down playing fiddle to blood? And you Mother my sacred grief can you return my death to me? Violence is my dark art I will burst from your skin go and climb a mountain become Abraham.

TRUE CALLING This girl is no appetizer for the party she doesn't mingle but sword in hand goes straight through the crowd. Bless the girl who sees she isn't the killer of a dream but murders boys before they climb into her pale blue and cold as a shoe. Hare Krishna! God bless! Buddha's kiss! Bless the imbeciles the lepers getting fucked by Kali the heiress of hideousness. She climaxes under their bellies lazy as slugs rushing like an amphetamine into their brains. Sacred is this girl's flesh that picks their bones clean. I've inherited of her wisdom deep as a womb rat floating in the amniotic fluid. I am the evil that once kneeled in front of the Pope. Ten years old and pearls swinging between my legs. When faith feeds you butterflies on a stuffed sofa you give birth to a red species of fungus. I never meant to ask? What men think when they do what God does in impunity. Monstrosity is bestowed by a father in the emergency room with his last bloody tear. I asked evil is it true that I've committed every reprehensible act outlandish as a zoo and never begged for forgiveness? If evil is my true calling pimps are priests in disguise whores drink the virgins' vodka and I am the water down girl tearing each single hair of my skull like Siddartha. I am the new version of Joan of Arc leading armies of termites in fields of piggeries. I am the cow flying over the moon while below God bless the sinners! Men hunt in the likeness of their faith into a musing of under aged girls. Hare Krishna! I am the new Antigone at the center of a death market with God who killed himself over my body. Evil always sees the truth in a bottomless pit.

QUEEN BEE She can open doors for you two feet up in your beds while you sleep faithful to your green grass she is no Waterloo of her beehive. She is looking for something higher up than her sixty-two feet red maple bowing to its own crimson death. A mind perhaps dumb fickle and oblivious. She has only but purpose to invade you set up residency where governments collapse become the supreme ruler. Something like a thought that runs like a train she'll make her throne from your nerves. Watch her! Weapon whetted with her swarm digging niches in your skull. She is the beginning of origins black like Europe in times of the great plague always pulling hearses to her bees keeping clocks. A huntress she keeps score of her slaves drones in the honey machine. It is your blood she needs full bloom between her legs like eyelashes fluttering wings marking off pimps at the holy station of angels in cheap plaster. Markova of the nightcap you are trapped in her queenship like a whore at a street corner. Child what it has cost her of priests shrinks club-footed midgets climbing her in tea parties. Queen of the unretractable in the becoming era of the deny it! Love thee and pigs in Jesus bandages she became the Queen bee of your heavenly Sodome. She has no pity for cadavers swarm in her wake she is one steely dead heart inside a lover.

I DON'T BELIEVE IN IT! This is newness the sweet scent of promises with the bloom bent awkwardly like a neck on its own paradigm of beauty. I don't believe in it! Spring comes with too much gumption like some addict who wants to quit at the drop of blood on the collapsed vein. The whore lies on her lichen-bed and they think it is me turning the black key into a cold angel. Give it to poetry the queen pimp to open the windows of paradox into the blue metal air. Strutting in the arena of the bull fat for gore. I don't believe in it! The full display of baby green gaping jaw for last night singed moth. Such fakery! Nature abounds with the blisters of white sheets face down on the last rape of innocence by her lover no less than a brute or a tree. Poetry again new little rows of innocent purple flowers glowing vertically feeling the first wave of agony. Give me the bee the dolled up drudge winging itself above the black ants dogs' feces spasmodic grass. Give her sweet needle sting the dumb dream swollen inebriety. I am ready for the terrible alphabet of grossness and inaptitude. A poet perhaps stitched to her horrid gorgonian reflection.

HER BODY HER DOUBLE Consider the girl who has swallowed religion sucking on her thumb while her god her poison spoiling the air fastened itself between her thighs. Give her the shut eye of the junky! Give her the totem of beasts! To not dream anymore of being courted by her pimp's tongue. Incarnate she spreads on her bed like a slow rose a metal alien gestating in her womb. Queen whore she has eaten the Book of the Dead. She has become the seducer of rats pigs and lepers hurrying the needle into the vein her blue god. The moon has bloomed into her throat violent as a blasphemy. She is a hymn as heavy as birth. Her castle is her perfection for the alien feeding it blood from her wrists. Crucified she shut her genitals with safety pins. As long she doesn't sleep but spit up the Host on sunday she is safe like a small pollen. But that thing needs its Christ sharp as a lie like a plant needs pesticides. Posing like a suburban whore she shed parts of her useless self the thought too quick to pray she preys upon the meek. White as a sun her spine opens like genitals. Birth! To the alien-god and Daddy. She ate the book her body her double. Greed for lust she is home.

INTUITION Intuition is the tightrope of poetry that injures itself in us. The cage is a chilly army of bars with a door like the jaw of a snapping turtle. Some country that has eyes like bullets opens the cage's mouth only for poetry which resembles a sort of goddess with her nauseating nature to slam it back on my bird. Never trust a woman slick as black ice with her pink lily charming the prosody to sing better in a cage. O the sweet blood of that woman I am her dog sad animal blooming like a pimp's cock. This is poetry's sad wing. Whore waist up in the mud battering this awful power stiff as a hammer thick with honey I rather drink the pig's blood. This woman is like a swinging door you never know which way it goes. She lets men from the night before slip under the door while the bird bathing in the spoon gets high on poetry's amputation. The cage is like a skull a kind of cancer of thoughts acquire over time. Rabbits mice priests nuns pimps and whores love dancing on the tightrope it gives them a feeling of propriety. Mushroom size I beat the rope with each word high but not dumb on pearls. I am the beautiful bones you caress in your bone-bag. I am the fury marble bare you lay poetry's corpse upon it. We all have to develop a taste for raw meat. Better to have blood at the lips than mold in your pocket. This woman sleeps in the refrigerator wears an opened dress is loved by everyone but the bird rots in her genitals. When I see her I turn to sweets in my Auschwitz coughing up enemas like poetry yesterday's wounds. I intuit poetry the thrush in my mind wings over us all bleeding.

SONG OF THE OCTOPUS Each gesture discovers itself immediately once my true shape is revealed. You beget it through the peeholes of your pupils these assassins! Coveting my legs much like death covets a man's lust for being wrapped by tentacles. I shift shape like one moves in space before an invasion. No more pantyhose boots or red stilettos black snake like slithery slimy-black is my new religion. My new legs curl like black ribbons stealthily move around your waist blinding your navel tightening your immortality downward choking the seed in its throbbing throat. I am the irrefutable proof that Venus has tentacles instead of a pink pair of useless legs. I am your best nurse in your infinite peril. Pimps are outdated lovers annihilated husbands dissipated while men midget size try climbing me one tentacle at a time. Beds are breakable habits unsafe and the initial wound you bastard! Unamendable. All I have to offer is the fruit of a new perversion yours! Defrauded of hope and power I own it. Song of the octopus leave that decrepit old scarred insane body. I am the new keeper of men lost in my sea wrecks impaled on blue rocks. Get the girl a hat to match she'll gouge your eyes with a hatpin. I am the future of women and abolition of men's power politics. I have no womb my brood comes out of my mouth the new slaughter machine. Love me in mud and water these fields of blood are my people.

VOODOO This boredom may flair and fawn tearing men's eyelids like the legs of spiders it is merciless. Nothing is so absurd than to hint at a man and be caught like a fish in your own net. Wolf like and flashing white teeth I do that to get what the vein desires for cheap. I am no less taunted by the thrill of getting that good love playing with my dress that goes high up like a wave and slams back down with the power of something that has never been written. Poetry at times is like a dumb fish a man near the rocks. No need to go any further my eyes see it all. This my voodoo to hook a man's slumber when he is most sly. Such bastard has no seasons. I keep my winter a gleaming spiderweb gossamer between my lips. If this mouth grieves it is for the heart of a sheep death weighs heavily at the end of my fingertips. Wool clouds between my legs all is voodoo from there on. Sharpening my knives like bells ringing on a saint's day. Fog in his eyes seeing but gold when it's black black spider black the lie is my own dark star I won gambling with a pimp. No whore wears her heart like glass nor thighs that rhyme with baas. Voodoo who? I bet the leper will do the pauper even the salamander the amphibian bastard caught on fire fingering the path to my womb. Poetry the bastard in his perilous sleep you have to love those slender fingers hitting piano keys like a blind man. Love isn't blind it is unconsoled by the gods. The bastard just begs for more in his infinite peril and I on my opium dreams of a glass web. Her finery is an inscrutable facade.