The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Love as Invasive Species by Ellen Kombiyil

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Side A

We ate burgers bloody,
buns toasted in grease
& where teeth
split the meat, red
dribbled down our chins
onto the grass.
August & the ghost
moon shone w/out the sun
having set. Bees
pummeled my head
so I’d get up & run,
sit down again,
slather butter on corn,
get up, circle & duck,
hand slap thigh slap
foot. The buried cat
sprouted a raspberry
bush. Nothing with
thorns ma said,
but that bush was
an exception. My sister
sat calm when a bee
brushed her cheek.
Like a statue she said,
but the world
is a breathing place.
Tulips dropped petals,
& the inner eyes
of stalks stained fingertips.
That night we whispered,
my sister & I,
through grillwork,
labyrinth of heating ducts
that connected us.
Ma’s love cries
echoed through the house.
I baked a cake,
ransacked the cupboard
to cover it
in sugared hearts.
How sweet it was,
feasting like that
in the dark.

Pastoral

Side B

                   Such greenness—the lawn!

Bent-back blades & dewdrop sequins
stitched in sequence replicate

                              the fly’s eye tweed of my dress.

              Here I am, mama, amplified the way
you always wished.

Lawnmower ripcord starts up,
                              the kind that tugs gasoline-rich

                              the kind that swipes off toes,
like when cousin Linus

              sprinkled the grass with his flesh.

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Editor’s Note from Love as Invasive Species:

The book these poems appear in was originally imagined as, and is printed as, a têtebêche or “double book.” The poems in Side A and Side B mirror and respond to each other. Some companion poems share exact titles, while others share shadow titles, which appear in grayscale on the poem page.

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