Rebecca Hawkes
Fidelities
Yellow-thighed finch in a bander’s grip.
Stunned hummingbird
pinched in the approved cigar hold.
The many ways to cling to something
that should flutter. Secure your ring
around its given limb.
Dearly beloved
we have gathered here
the data - tagged birds
are more appealing to potential mates.
It is throwing off the studies
mapping bluethroat fecundity.
At the used bookstore slash matcha lounge
slash natural wine bar, another customer admits
that professional puppeteer dating circles
have always been a little tight.
The laughter interrupts my theory
that asking somebody to buy you a tarot deck
is as bad as asking them to ask you
to marry them. Last night
I saw my first alive raccoon
conniving elegantly on a powerline.
Her gravid teats seeped milk
along our very source of light.
Every day I garner new appreciations
for rabies. Besides, only one of us
looks good in ivory. Someone
at last is cranking the umbrellas
over the outdoor dining area.
There is a hair caught in my teeth
that might have sprung
from anywhere on your body.
​
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Desire Lines
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The blooming pears are bravely asking
what if your whole suburb smelled like cum?
A sometime girlfriend paints self-portraits
from outside her body, in a dream.
My brain luxuriates by churning
its catastrophes like butter,
already doubting the partial
eclipse. Did congealed twilight drip
thick as lard over the river? If so why
didn’t we collect that tallow glow? Decant it
into a glove, feed wicks into the fingers
as richness set quick so we could wield
a waxen hand of glory? Lordy, give me flames
at the crescent of each nail. Searing thumbs
strummed on your shoulderblades
where sinews whine like lyre strings.
In every patch of clover, green mutations
I’m incapable of seeing. So much for magic
eye exercises. Yet I know this dreamer
who can bend to any berm and pull up
four-leaved luck. While I am in denial of totality:
something so vast it’s safer to ignore
than trust. Like atmosphere, or oxygen.
Lying in the dark while meteors burn fast
as hearts. You and I are meeting at the center
of a labyrinth, crooked borders mowed into a lawn
so short we both strode straight through it
by accident. This township amnesiac
with hyacinth decadence. Sharing breath
and vials of tester perfume sets
while I attempt to forge a different signature
scrawled in my fragrance. Abandoning my old life
and her animalic lavenders. I spritz. I say
to you: here, sniff. Try this resinous scent
of dragonflies stranded in amber. Now
rosehip, marshmallow, mango licorice,
the whispered parting of the grasses
where we are not supposed to go and so go gladly.
Rebecca Hawkes is a queer painter-poet originally from rural Aotearoa New Zealand. Her first book MEAT LOVERS won Best First International Collection in the UK Poet Laureate's 2022 Laurel Prize and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist for bisexual poetry. She is head shepherd of warm-blooded literary journal Sweet Mammalian and co-edited the Antipodean climate crisis anthology No Other Place to Stand. In the US her poems have been awarded Salt Hill's Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Palette Poetry's Sappho Prize, with more work published or forthcoming in places like Phoebe, New Delta Review, and Gigantic Sequins. Rebecca is currently topsy-turvy between hemispheres studying an MFA in yearning (and, to a lesser extent, poetry) at the University of Michigan.
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