Rebecca Hawkes | Carrion Flower | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Rebecca Hawkes is a queer painter-poet from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her first book Meat Lovers was awarded Best First International Collection in the UK Poet Laureate's 2022 Laurel Prize and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist for bisexual poetry. She is head shepherd of warm-blooded literary journal Sweet Mammalian and co-edited the anthology of Aotearoa and Pacific climate poetry, No Other Place to Stand. Rebecca's poems have been awarded Salt Hill Journal's Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Palette Poetry's Sappho Prize, and her chapbooks Softcore Coldsores and Hardcore Pastorals can be found in AUP New Poets 5 and Cordite, respectively. She is currently topsy-turvy between hemispheres as a Fulbright scholar studying an MFA in yearning (and, to a lesser extent, poetry) at the University of Michigan.

Rebecca Hawkes' Website

Also by Rebecca Hawkes: Meat Lovers Hardcore Pastorals Softcore Coldsores

October 16, 2024

Rebecca Hawkes

Carrion Flower

When people here say horror it sounds like whore. Each word yields bloody history on the lips. The way grenades are named for pomegranates. Their kindred kind of redness — as if all detonations should spray seeds. I planted a scarlet mine beneath my past. A sequined shrapnel shell. Let me spit its pin: ecdysiast. A painted giantess in eight-inch Pleasers, I splintered stage lights with my crystal heels. Ground men’s bones to make my daily bread. Welcome To The Jungle on the speakers. And I the florid flourish of the forest. No slipper orchid’s wisp — more brawny flora. Proud sinews rippled in my shoulders as I swayed atop a stem of chrome. My pulse points dripped synthetic cherry. Feral musks and earthen ouds. A carrion bloom. I set my lure of rot and did not feign surprise when I caught flies. Lovers called it fine until we fought. Then they would say whore like it was war. Tore at my bones until we broke their beds. A crimson blossom set root in my core. At least crawlers partaking of my pollens always washed their grateful paws. When I say whores I hope we sound like horses. Our thunder of stilettoes pounding club beats through the loam. We’re looking for a flower with red petals. Its smell like putrid flesh. A mermaid rotting into seafoam.

Moving from Aotearoa to the US, I have had to come to terms with my own accent. The multiple possible deliveries of words have become more conspicuous in both my poetry and attempts to communicate directly day to day. What rhymes in my voice might fall flat when read by American classmates, while I am charmed/alarmed by mondegreens at the Kroger checkout routinely. That misheard music is important to this poem, as is a certain forceful muscularity of movement. I wanted this work to brandish its strength, not just to resurrect the abs I used to have in a past life climbing chrome, but because a core of steel concealed in playfulness is (in so many ways) essential for dancing.