Fat Venus: Three Poems by Danny Pelletier

I. Venus of Willendorf at Her Toilet

the ugliest cook in the college café
wears whiter through the white of a chef
coat, like snow on an un- and shoveled walk, (a shift
of color subtle as an areola,) a white brassier
to contain breasts mottled with a soiree
of molefrecklezits, these
oddly decorated Faberge tits she’s
hidden to hide a spill of wine, a cabernet
birthmark.
to clip
her bush she sits on the can, hedges
how much to loose into the flush, loose labia
unsuckled, unsucked, her cunt unhow-a-snake-dredges
-a-toilet-by-her-husband’s-snoring-tongued.
if this were Arabia
no more snake charmer’d she be, no Scheherazade her clit.

II. Domovoi Peeping at the Sleeping Merchant Wife

wife you lie, wife, in the moon-(merged
yellowgreens)light of clockradio, my Kustodiev’s
merchant wife, you lie nude, from wide
hips from waves of sheet curved
up emerges you, submerged, wife, in Decem-
berslumber, your icy skin, you wife, you rescind
to waist and up again, a swell of breasts to go to when
newly incubated babe is born.
my wife, you lie, i’ve eyed
you, Beauty you, Venus you naked goddess of Russ-
ian painters you—
beside you i, hirsute, stand, your domovoi,
our baby boy buoyed up inside the hush
around you, this is how, this house’s spirit, i
have found you when from out that slumber (clockradio has sheared it) i
waded, i breathed shallow, i made not a noise.

III. Rosalba Kallipygos

no Botticelli you, not birthed from
the sea blown into a blanket thrust round your nude form
but from semen into smokes littered about your
feet, into beds with chubby cats and fat cats (men with chevys and rolled washingtons), into XL clothes you shed like used condoms, into come
crusted on bedsheets that you press to your underdeveloped bosom
when the moon is ripe to piss—
although Authority hisses images of your corpse
washed up upon the shore
of some unimportant body of water, this you know is false, you ain’t dumb:

you’ve read Eliot in class, you know the score of whimpers and bangs, you know in the song he sang the kittens downed with light brown hair aren’t the ferals with the fangs
you know.
you know the sawdust restaurants and cheap hotels, when you stand on
oyster-shells they break, when the fat cats take you out you order steak
and lobster and you know they’ll dish you up a night in jail if they catch you hands down
running out that door if they spot that fake
ID, the stolen CC with someone else’s name.
but if the night’s gotta end, let it end with a bang.

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© Danny Pelletier 2011

Danny Pelletier teaches writing in central New York (state, not city). His work can be found at Monkeybicycle, qarrtsiluni, contemporary haibun, and One Forty Fiction, among others.