Kendra DeColo & Tyler Mills

Watching Magic Mike with John Waters at the Provincetown Movie House


John Waters holds his disappointment
          like a god blessing the room as if to say
                    this is what you call holiness, this sprawl of imitation
                              glitz, gawdy as a museum gift store paperweight?
 
          Or, why look above when splendor
                    is all around us? The stickiness of bodies
                              a defiance to the pristine chill where we’ve taken refuge
                                        from the July 4th mob, obscene
 
as a pool party sometimes. And I still can’t help but feel
          like we become close to Magic Mike by wanting him,
                    so I am the star of my own jump scene when I bolt
                              up from my seat and swivel like an Ambien-
 
          stuffed piñata to read fortunes in the bottle caps
                    of liters of Mountain Dew. A star lives in our blood,
                              John Waters explains, extraterrestrial life hovering
                                        around our mouths while we stay silent as Greek
 
statues at the Met. Look at this utopia: the stripper meets the girl
          next door, and they have clean sex--have appearing
                    like one of Yeats’s wild swans at Coole in my mind--
                              and he pays for everything, and no woman is getting
 
          punched or strangled for being black.
                    John Waters, you are real to me as the desire
                              to hold onto something ungodly
                                        in this theatre near the sea that scrubs the beach
 
like a street cleaning brush. Instead of wads of cash, you hold
          garter snakes in your pocket, gold glitter
                    under your collar, and Vincent van Gogh’s face
                              ​silkscreened over your heart.

Prop Mistress


For the kitchen scene, we bought a double-basin
          farmhouse sink for $450 online—and the walls?
 
So yellowed with forty years of cigarette smoke.
          Teenagers have climbed in and out of joy
 
through the basement window for generations
          and now pocket needles of blood-brown heroin.
 
How the gray-streaked towns, sleep
          through the nickel-gray sleet of February.

How toddler sucks the life out of a thumb and waits by the door
          of the Family Dollar in snowman pajama pants smeared with ash.
 
It was easy to buy this farmhouse, no longer on a farm
          ​for the project. The kitchen hardly different from the 1960s.
 
What is a hard difference? How much is or isn’t?
          For $300, we bought a GE fridge with that unmistakable silver handle
 
locking everything in. And we washed the walls
          with pans of sudsy Dawn—wiped that vintage botanical paper down,
 
those olive-green leaves the size of six-week old kittens
          with fronds growing groovy into a beige background.
 
(Five rolls of it: $500.) Now all we need is a woman like me
          to sit at the teal Formica table, her reflection warped
 
in the steel rib of a charred spoon while she counts stacks
          of bills and rolls them up into her canary lingerie,
 
the kind you buy for a quarter
          of your paycheck at Neiman’s,
 
her blonde coifed bob like sculpted gelatin,
          a little bit sinister in its precision, not one hair out of place
 
as she waits for the hand of the clock to stroke 3 pm:
          her signal to smear matte cream
 
over the fresh bruise under her eye, stash her husband’s
          money in a drawer, throw on a $200 robe
​
and greet the children as they tumble
          through the door, asking why the house
 
smells like sugar, why mom looks like a fairy,
          your eyes ringed and sparkly.

Women in Line


Praise the hands that make a beak, fingertips
          to thumb, but not the quack quack two men mock
 
at us while my mother, sister and I talk about the lost
          key these turquoise days of August.
 
That particular tenacity of yeast infections
          from wearing a wet bikini all afternoon
 
inside the orange juice walls of the Dunkin’
          Donuts I don’t need to describe except for
 
the almost black chocolate moons
          and stone-white vanilla rings that seem so easy
 
to taste anywhere, the starry pinched centers
          of crullers whose glazed openings I’d penetrate
 
with my finger as a kid, twirling them like a prize.
          The cashier, petite and Russian, who studied
 
at the community college, would be there
          every morning while I waited for the bus, brewing
 
coffee and making small talk with Ray who spent
          the night in an alleyway nearby. She was always
 
kind, even to the men who sucked on her name
          too long, lurked around for a quick peek of her
 
breasts when she bent down to refill the dispensers.
          Maybe this is where I learned to smile
 
when a man says you’d look better in something
          tight. Praise my mother who knows this too when she

looks at the two men who are now pretending
          to flap their wings. You can’t buy pomegranate juice
 
at Dunkin’ Donuts, one of the men jokes,
          and I want to show him the full-on
 
scoby growing inside my swim suit, tentacles
          of bacteria reaching out from this lacy
 
swamp, ask him to cure it for me by rubbing
          the page of a dictionary with two stray hairs.
 
But women in line don’t speak. We look away
          like they’re crayfish wriggling through the creamed
 
mud of a pond’s edge—not cranes
          ​opening & closing startled wings on the water—and have
 
been put there by hymens
          and the press of an iron and the collective
 
voice of an audience that says, You are not
          onstage for us, so Shut Up. Women in line
 
are not in line but on the merry-go-round
          of mescaline these men swallowed together
 
before coddling their cocks in the lodges
          of their baggy jeans and sneering, Our heaven
 
is Hellenic as rape. I had pitied them
          because even now the heteronormative
 
dictatorship that lingers in my cochlea
like ear buds pushed in too far with bad music
 
whispers: No girlfriends, lonely men.
Revenge made an errand of me, hungry
 
for itself. I thought I lost the key, my mother said
          reaching into the maw of her purse,

and for a moment I saw something other than
          contempt sprawled across their faces--
 
the desire to have a woman
          dig deep inside of them, to penetrate
 
and retrieve what they didn’t know
          ​had been lost.

Love Poem with Whip-its and HGTV


Call me sweetheart when you fiddle
with the hotel TV reception.
 
Kiss me like a scratch ticket
with one foil moon left to scrape
 
and I’ll soak in the Jacuzzi of your ambivalence
sip from paper cups blessed with saved-up
 
spit, swallow you in my open concept
living room. Yes, I’m a sucker for HGTV.
 
Don’t we all get off to granite counter tops?
Let me swish awhile in your curls. Call me crazy
 
but I’ll slip two fingers into your bad caulk work
while we wait for the voiceover that narrates our suspense
 
like rare shimmers of sludge deep in a well;
you and me, two lovers huffing
 
a tank of nitrous
that never expires.






--
Kendra DeColo is the author of My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016) and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry. Her poems and essays appear in Waxwing, Los Angeles Review, Gulf Coast, Bitch Magazine, VIDA, and elsewhere. She is co-host of the podcast Re\VERB: A Third Man Books Production and she lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Tyler Mills is the author of two books of poems, Hawk Parable (winner of the 2017 Akron Poetry Prize) and Tongue Lyre (winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and Poetry, and her essays have appeared in AGNI, Copper Nickel, and The Rumpus. She is an assistant professor at New Mexico Highlands
University, editor-in-chief of The Account, and a resident of Santa Fe, NM.