Evil Brecken

February 18, 2014

Brecken Hancock's poetry, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Riddle Fence, Event, CV2, Grain, The Fiddlehead, and Studies in Canadian...

Is what you reckon.
Upper lip, brindled. Pubes, lichen.
Brackish armpits; thigh-thickened

chicken. A wank on the way
to other women. Box on a stick;
wake of peckers. Stupid

with bravado yet brutally
forsaken by self. I rut
in her blood past the bracelets.

Fused sex to sex, pixel to pixel,
we sit together, shit together,
brandish our teats

like handkerchiefs, oink oink,
muddle in the bristly
bacon of us: wrecking-

ball vulva, this bathetic smile.
These brambly old hands.
Our sandpaper masturbation.

Booze keeps the wounds
clean and the brain
meaner. Brecken,

you’re named after a dog.
Brecken, you cuckold
my time. Brecken, whose cock’s

in our esophagus?
It sickens me
to take her in the mirror.

That’s wrong – I’m not taking her.
She’s choked me out. Bracken
to my lesser fern.

Or I’m the leather chew
she’s breaking in.
Her nightly grinding

buckles the crackling
cheeks, pouches the jowls,
leaves black pudding

beneath the eyes.
Would you liken her
to her daddy? Something

a little manly? Or to the sag
of grandma’s hip-sac reflection?
How I’m aching to dissect

the feckless veil of her –
shave her face off
my face, bride

to my suicide.
But I’m too bloody
vain to maim what’s visible

above the neckline
and I can’t be alone.
Goddammit, don’t go.

Don’t tell me my self-pity
is a bummer. Don’t
leave. Don’t say I’m both

the obstacle and the goal.
I’m my own heckler.
Brecken is what?

Freckled? Mulled wine?
Bluff? Slope rise,
hillside, dip, declivity,

depravity? To break?
To shake a feeling?
Mottled, hot, hoochy,

declining. How do you know
what’s to your liking?
If you, unsuspecting,

met yourself, would you
recognize your Jekyll’s hidden
side? Share a glass?

Dish on childhood neglect?
Finish each other’s pretenses?
Hook up? Break up?

Bridle the fucker’s brio?
Hack through varicose veins
that blacken the calf,

breaching cellulite? No –
I won’t pull myself together.
I’m my own distraction.

There’s a widening gulf
between each brazen
erection of I–I–I,

a whole brood of knockoffs
infecting me. These phantom
pregnancies I’m expecting.

Uterus, barbed. Tubes, unheimlich.
Pickled genes; paretic pelvis. Brr,
I need protecting ...

Hush, my Brecken, lie down with me.
Lover, lecher, what beckons – your bestie,
penetrant, bloodline, heaven.

Brecken Hancock's poetry, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Riddle Fence, Event, CV2, Grain, The Fiddlehead, and Studies in Canadian Literature. She is Reviews Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine and Interviews Editor for Canadian Women in the Literary Arts. The Art of Plumbing, her most recent chapbook, is out with above/ground press and her first full-length manuscript of poems, Broom Broom, is forthcoming next month from Coach House Books. She lives in Ottawa.