The Continent of Reena and Marcus' Marriage

Thylias Moss

Marcus was most fond of coriander
for cutting a trench into his tongue

and hiding there to pond his coffee
and trap smell of the sour pillow rolls
(as if flavored with baby sputum)
Reena made which should be famous:

a mix of rye and corn meal, safflower oil, aging
(come-back baby) milk, and shredded pumpkin to be silk,
dill, pine nuts and seeds his teeth cracked;
rolls indented in the center that Reena promised-by the way
she buttered only the hot depression-was a scale model
of the indentation of her head on his shoulder on his pillow.
(Once.)

While pregnant, she made ginger soy and honey pepper rolls
that, once filled with toasted sugared mums, became oddly
luminescent,
and he had prospered
from watching Reena swallow crumbling bites, fireflies
sparkling through the delicate skin of her neck
as they went all the way down. Commonwealth

of disintegration.


He wondered whether or not the light should get wet,
unable to conceive, for the moment,
of any kind of bioluminescence, just electrical sources
and surges, inner lamp, the umbilical cord an electrical cord
plugged into the back of Reena's navel, pig snout an alternate
standby socket in a self-frying generator if necessary

and he feared it would be, & out of overloaded love feared that immersion
in water while Reena was so electrified might kill her

(The fire-breathing dragon breathes fire outwardly: it is fire
of exhalation, but this was fire of total respiration: breathed
out and in,
scorching, flaming interior bouquets of organs and shrubs
of nerves)

(The Blue Reena:
perennial)

(the Blue Reena out of nowhere:

on the fourth of July: she blossoms further into
the Screaming Meanie)

(hogs opportunity)

and just whips up out of the most inviolate Antarctic
or dervish winds, snowy cream and sugar dahlias,
some the size of flying saucers.