It’s Not About
Poetry by Brian Clifton
It’s not about beauty.
I want the knowledge
of the pig—that fried
chicken lies at bacon’s
threshold—of Love
Line’s late hymn,
of that traipsing figure
along the bedroom’s top
corners. I want not to have
a problem with pulling
hair from the carpet—
that grey-brown gunk
born of industry
in America, two sons
unraveling an orange,
at the base of the finger-
nail, gone white crescent.
At the bottom of it,
it’s not really about beauty
or how to use a home
video of a cat giving
birth in reverse,
sack reformed, stuffed
back into the queen’s
vagina, four kittens
now three and so on
until we forget
the solution; the cap
resealing a Mickey’s
and the idea of kittens
hasn’t even come up.