Brianna Noll

The Art of the Insult

Artless, bloat-kidneyed gibbet.
Cudgel, implement of pain
and death, how you lash.
What a lovely container you
are, shrouded in the old
razzle dazzle: a trick—a delight!--
a trick. In the end, you are
just a hologram, and I stick
my finger through your eye.
This is how we demean.
We wee lads and lasses--
we can be such worms, burrowing
for devices to widen the space
between us, turn nouns
to verbs: fistulas to festers.

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In the Gown I Wear to the Uprising

We all made our clothes and mail
for the occasion. Some melted down
their own cutlery for a helm or gauntlet
or gorget, melted their last coins
and pulled them, molten, taught
to lace into links for hauberks.
But I made myself a gown, every
thread unraveled from the cape
of a fallen king, a cloth my family
had been weaving since the beginning.
I could fit a crossbow in my bustle,
throwing stars in the balconette, but I
do not. There is a politick in these
clothes, but clothes mean differently
than actions, and our actions are clear:
we make, and wager, and make. It is
in our blood to make, not to make bleed.