The Continent of Reena and Marcus' Marriage

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.