Berfrois

Two Poems by Rita Mookerjee

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Lana Del Rey Asks The Crowd For Requests

I don’t feel sorry for attractive women with broken hearts / buck up buttercup / he never got you off anyway / I don’t care how she pushes her tits together as she / leans over the glass table to do her line / I don’t want to hear about hard kisses wild horses or the wind on her face in the Cadillac under the sunset on the boulevard / irresponsible driving isn’t my idea of sexy and I don’t / know anything about cars so don’t waste my time with a pin-up girl song and dance / a blue collar mythos origin story of the wayward starlet / red lipstick looks good on everyone so a rouged pout doesn’t make you a knockout / it doesn’t take sacrifice to look great in denim / to mourn a lost life with an imaginary lover / to walk on the beach and get people to look back at you / to be the only girl playing pool / to smoke cigarettes / stop telling women to choose sadness over fury as if / this Americana bullshit ever had room for them / in the first place

 

Kintsugi

you don’t get ears like mine by playing it safe with silver & cubic zirconia
glittery little lies no I can spot the real thing across a room and that fake shit

even faster because at some point women stopped loving gold
and began to covet its cheaper sisters I hear someone say there’s no such thing

as rose gold which isn’t true at all because sure it’s made in a lab but alloying gold
with copper and palladium isn’t imitation it’s innovation and who doesn’t love a rosy glow

the blush of cheeks in wind a lip bitten after saying the wrong thing lips bitten while doing the
deed rosy lids fluttering in orgasm. Of course rose gold is a thing

it’s a hybrid but you wouldn’t understand that so play it safe in your sterling silver world
I’ll be a molten goddess lit from vulva to neck in the brightest yellow gold

dreaming of my lobes stretched 3 times their size double pendulums
weighted with orbs and facets not a sliver of helix unadorned two fabergé seashells

glinting evil in the night people can’t decide whether to cringe or to stare
the gross decadence of it all: the split flesh filled with sun

because in kintsugi, you take broken pottery and pipe gold into its cracks: it still looks broken
but being broken and covered in gold is better than being whole in the first place.

In my ears I lock my future adding a puncture spilling chi for each victory giving new meaning
to the word outshine because these babies are my bank vault my dragon’s den impaling intruders

who dare tread inside no room left for teeth or bones and I don’t pack my ears like this in
a doomsday sense; my gold-hoarding is lusty but never desperate nothing like

the rows of      WE BUY GOLD       shops lining the shadier streets of any given city the abrupt
command a violent promise of cash. I’d die before I gave up my gold these loops and clusters
are how a brown girl gets medals for bravery and trophies for conquest

the value appreciates over time and I’m not talking about bars and bricks in a yard
glowing underfoot that’s what I call a waste it shines because it was never meant to live in the

ground and neither was I so maybe someone can melt all my jewelry down
and grind it to a fine dust. My ashes will glitter: residue in a dragon’s wake.

 


About the Author:

Rita Mookerjee’s poetry is featured or forthcoming in Hollow, Lavender Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Spider Mirror Journal, and others. Her critical work has been featured in the Routledge Companion of Literature and Food, the Bloomsbury Handbook to Literary and Cultural Theory, and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Twenty-First Century Feminist Theory. She is a PhD candidate at Florida State University specializing in contemporary Caribbean literature.