Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Tiffany Midge

Those plugs jutting out from her neck:
she’s curious, what are they for?

The fiery thoroughfare of crisscrossing scars 
from temple to jaw, brow to ear:
should she look for something implicit there?

One eye brown, pilfered from an orange-haired
prostitute in Potter’s Field; the other fixed askew
in her head, a child’s like-new ornament:
is he a misogynist? Did his mother abandon him?

One arm, the muscular backhoe of a fieldworker’s
connected to the jagged star of a hand:
she wonders, is she expected to work?

The vagina, intact and as pretty as postcard sunset:
should she ruin it for him? 

The abdomen owns the legacy of multiple births,
a miller’s wife spitting out babes like peas:
is there room to grow more?

What hair that’s left is black as licorice,
sparse on her scalp like a locust-run crop:
does he secretly love his sister?

Her dresses, hung in the closet like sides of beef,
taffetas, crinolines, colors of esplanade sherbets:
should she dance for him?

At night, locked in her chambers, 
she hears desire’s low growl, smells iron, lust, rain:
what does it mean? Is it for her?

* * * 

Tiffany Midge is the recipient of the Diane Decorah Poetry Award from The Native Writers Circle of the Americas for her collection, Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed published by Greenfield Review Press. The chapbook, Guiding the Stars to Their Campfire, Driving the Salmon to Their Beds, was published in 2005 by Gazoobi Tales. No Tell Motel First published this poem in October 2009. Tiffany wrote, "Sketched during a particularly loathsome funk. How to make sense of rejection from one who was so revered? Adored as one would adore a creator—the creator of so much splendid exchange? Our heroes and gods are fallible and limited after all. To transcend the grotesquerie of one’s imperfections is bliss! And suddenly, the fall and disappointment from that transcendence, leading to doubts and wary interrogations."