Fritz Ward
Fritz Ward is the author of Tsunami Diorama (The Word Works, 2017) and the chapbook Doppelganged (Blue Hour Press, 2011). His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, The Adroit Journal, BOAAT, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He works at Swarthmore College and lives just outside of Philadelphia.
Born
Listen to the prayers
spoiling
in my mouth:
Be my anchor,
my orca,
my killer.
Yours is the body with an elegy
inside it.
Born
We raise our wildfire
on paper dolls cut
from the hulls
of paper ships.
We set them aflame,
then afloat.
When the drowning
begins, we tell
the truth:
the ocean is
a body
full of bodies.
No Sleep
But all night we fuck
each other up
trying not to say it.
In the morning, she slips her bare
feet into the husk of her slippers
as the decapitated cornfields
blur into a country we call
Almost. After coffee, she reads me
something black and impermanent,
something that once was a tree
but couldn’t remain engrained.
Later, at the foot of a mountain,
when I’m about to—
she bends her ring finger
until it’s a hook
and slides it into the O
of my mouth and tells me
about the fish scales in her lipstick
and the rainbow trout buried
beneath her family tree.
I’d like to call her God,
but that too is barbed
and baited. Instead,
we breathe in the scenery
until one of us bleeds
and the other moistens
a red washcloth
with the slight sting
of her eroticism,
and wipes away
the evidence.