Rebecca Loudon
Dear Henry,
my friend brought me a bear and I lived with the bear in my house and we were quite happy then my friend returned and told me he had to chop off the bear's paws and I would have to eat them I sucked the meat out of one paw and I was disgusted and filled with grief now I'm eating an avocado that tastes like fifty five acres of California heartland tastes like Frida Kahlo's dream of having a baby tastes like sugar and sweet grass and cream and butter and cotton bed sheets dried on a clothes line in the hot sun and it tastes of the cornfields that spread across Illinois this avocado came into my hands like Jesus on a bender I'm not kidding
Dear Henry,
I was obsessed with untangling fragile knotted up chains as a child I sat for hours with a small needle worked on each link until the chain was restored to wholeness I untie knots you’re a knot I knew a girl in a yellow dress with crutches and one leg in the center of her body she wore a yellow shoe we walked to the theater to hear the orchestra tuning they always played Turandot the girl in the yellow dress sang Nessun Dorma I saw the salmon colored poppy opened overnight I looked right down into its center that pale with four black eyes inside watching the sky as I watch the sky
Dear Henry,
how does it feel how does it feel to get old like summer in Chewelah like sugar pie an unmanageable stain a kind of hoarding I abandoned my clothes Hugh Hefner wore a suit in public enough already with the stained smoking jacket and coiffed hair tug your sweater across your stomach dear or sit with a pillow on your lap watch the bone gaunted mules pull cart across Wyoming I gave you my hung my pedicure my airplane hangar everything in aspic how many evenings you wasted soaking your foot in a bowl of hot water and Epsom salts it’s time to stage a fake suicide scatter your final notes everywhere including the Aurora Bridge and the mighty Mississip swallow whatever Jesus puts in your mouth choose another child an empty prize bent toward the shack where they gut fish where we gutted ourselves the artist who created Superman had a gig on the side drawing for an S and M fetish mag knew it wasn’t ripe but he kept eating guttural momentum would it make a difference to the sperm splurging split that morning I bought steaks and a GI Joe doll roasted the hairpin that hid your surgical coin folded it into the secret girl book this morning I’m looking for you not one bit shy buster not one bit plague or earwig in your egg drop soup I am hammer toed I am a hammerhead shark waking up God
Rebecca Loudon is the author of three collections of poetry; Tarantella, Radish King, and Cadaver Dogs, and two chapbooks; Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home, and TRISM. These three letter/poems are from her hybrid manuscript Queer Wing-ed, about the writer and outsider artist Henry Darger. Loudon lives on an island on the Salish Sea in Washington, and teaches violin lessons to children.