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On Pork and Camellia
BY MARIEL ALONZO
University of the Philippines – Diliman, ’16
2015 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Honorable Mention
as if by cutting the meat
you release its flowers –
frail parallel lines
leaping through
a cliff & graze
at sedimentation
crashing lightweight
on plastic chopping
boards – hymn of fracture
wings, quiet
pornography of marble
pushed into
a grinder –
whine & gristle
of gunmetal
& mechanic
song of pre-germination,
see the veins
of a hummingbird’s jaw
bulge, nectar sluicing
through its hollow –
behind the knees, soft
armpit & elbow
in pulse,
stretch marks betraying
ripeness
as each tendril claws
to form a nest,
peppered & salted
& palmed, laid
to rest in antiquity
tattooing prisons
on flesh,
a blooming
to baroque petals
of rain, unsalted, as it hits
the murk of flood, hissing,
how quick you took
me to heaven
and left me there.