The Thing (1982)

Stephanie Cawley

Art could be good and also bad.Hard not to love a monster and a tank-topped hunk.That’s camp, you say, stepping rock to rock.I agree the hot dogs looked more appetizing as pink cartoons.You could desire to cup, gently, a nice ass, not even sexual.Missed connection with hot person wearing mustard hat in out of town deli.I had to feel it in the throat, now, to call it “good.”A movie with no women in it can be about women, flamethrower minor                    character and all.Stuck in subtext, like honey, meaning fine about it, golden.The monster considers a part as good as a whole.When the doctor cuts the monster open it looks vaginal, can’t tell if that’s just me.Had lost ability to track wink versus critique.You said you prefer girls because they have, in general, cuter butts.It was nice to feel nice, I did keep saying that.I kept making excuses for my sticky hands, which I mostly kept to myself.Understood another film to be quote-un-quote interesting, but kept checking the                      minutes left.A poem could aspire to say something meaningful and then foam like warm beer.Inside one man is another man, hotter, more jacked.I wanted to see the monster one last time, even lit on fire.I wanted the monster to live out her gross life, be made prom queen, wear a crown.No one stays hot, you say, looking at the hunk’s present day face.The deli sells something called the Three Pig Rambo, open bread                       stacked with meat.Some metaphors are so obvious they’re not metaphors, just facts in costume.Thinking of aging hunks, I remember the discs of bologna nailed to a                       wall, called art.It’s warmer than we expected in here, the artist said, hence the smell.If you understood you didn’t need a man for affection, think of what, to one,                        you might do.Now that I don’t care about anything, I get hotter every day.I prefer both because why not.

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Stephanie Cawley is a poet in Philadelphia. They are the author of No More Flowers (Birds, LLC) and My Heart But Not My Heart (Slope Editions). Recent poems have been published in Protean, Prolit, and the tiny. More at stephaniecawley.com.

"Here are the layers of an exquisite desire, bared to the world, teeth and all. Blood and all. Queer as in: the death of narrative, the death of feeling as an explanatory framework. Long live our pleasures, our unruly beauty rendered illegible by inherited patterns of wanting. Long live the possibility of pleasure as a pathway towards an expansive sense of being, made and unmade at the site of skin against skin. Because we know our arrival is not a point on the horizon, but an endlessly renewable life force within us, between us, for me, for you. 'One cannot know what one wants until one knows what wanting is,' Cawley writes -- this is a collection of coming into life and living, even in the presence of death. Even in the presence of a void left by diminishments and binaries and a world intent on foreclosures. Reading this book, I came to understand 'the future didn’t have to look like anything.'"
—Kazumi Chin

"The journey of these poems had me on the edge of my seat and always on the brink of seeing the world in new ways! 'If there was a hole in the center of the forest / I knew I would be dragged into it.' Here is a book we want in our lives, poetry to return to again and again! Stephanie Cawley’s No More Flowers is absolutely brilliant!"
—CAConrad

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