Two Poems by Vicki Vargas

By Vicki Vargas

 

Bottomless Mimosa

 

A stranger’s dog threshes against its chain until the weeping of metal-links distracts our waiter. I watch your broad hands grip the neck of the glass, and I am reminded of last night—how easy your fingers found my mouth in the dark, tasting of dish-soap, light blood from fresh split cuticles—drunk, I complained about my god-fearing mother who can drink the blood of Christ every Sunday, but is off her ass with one sip of Bailey’s, and what I wanted was for you to say that’s never going to be you, that I would still drink you under the table, that I would never need to believe in anything other than waking up at twelve-thirty to sit here, across from you, celebrating nothing, clinking glasses because we will never have enough.

 

 

 

 

 

Girls Bathroom

 

A hero wraps his skull around my neck

& I laugh at the idea of being polycephalous

 

But what I want to be is monumental, Hydra

With glittering teeth in a field where ruby

Escapes my mouth instead of blood

 

He is hiding in the crook of my tail

Torch and golden sickle

I vaguely sense him      I am soaring

 

Below me, women transform into blue sheep

Leaping from hill to cliff until they are blocked

Didn’t you know it was rutting season

 

Didn’t I know my heads would cover this tiled floor

Peridot faces lurching luminous past each stall

Neck cauterized so acutely I could not regenerate

 

I’d like to tell my nieces that there is so much time

To let the wrong men have you, so many will try

And there is never room in a poem for my rape

 

But I promise I’ll tell you when you ask about the day

I was smooth-scaled with venom enough to escape him

 

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Vicki Vargas is a transnational feminist latin@, and more. Hailing from the Lower East Side, Manhattan by the river no one washes in, she is currently writing (but mostly eating) in Tokyo for a few months. She completed her BA at Allegheny College, and recently, her MFA at Columbia University.