Poetry-Susana Case

• SUSANA CASE

Suicide Threat

My lover demands I make a list
of everything I haven’t told him,
or that I lied about,
and when I’m done, to call him—
by Thursday, before he goes to bed.
If it’s not done by Thursday,
not to bother because
he isn’t going to be here.
Where are you going to be?
Dead, he says.
In case he means it,
I call on Wednesday
with five small possibilities.
Make another list, he yells,
before disconnecting.
•
•
•
Fast forward a month,
to the night I leave on vacation.
He brings me a rock. On one side,
a line separates the two halves.
On the other side, the two
halves blend into one.
He says the rock is our relationship,
solidly fused.
•
•
•
On the plane from Delhi
to Kathmandu, I glance out
my window and see only clouds.
I look again and realize
the clouds are ice-covered
mountains. Later,
the last time we speak, I tell him
the mountains are the relationship,
quietly eroding.

At the Border, a Man

A man checking passports, who has a gun
on his hip.
He offers me a ride, hotel room.
Would getting astride him be sex work?
I decide it depends on the kiss.
That permeable border

between sex work and not.

A hotel room—drawings of the gulf,
the castle, Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia,
fake flowers on the dresser.

Chekhov’s gun,
next to the dusty blue blossoms.

Even when using protection,
there’s no protection.
In the newspaper, a woman
asks about kissing.
Her husband doesn’t like to.
The wife of the man she’s met
doesn’t like to.
What should they do?

The border between cheating and not—

Another version: at the border, a guard
who lives with his mother.
A comely man, he offers
to take me to dinner.
After too much wine, I kiss him,
take him to my room.
The border between caressing and not.

A hotel room—drawings of the gulf,
the castle, Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia.

At the border, I first need
to decide about the kiss.

Phallic Girl

—title of a mannequin by Yayoi Kusama

The sixteen-year-old girl examines
a fallacy of phalluses—collective noun,
compulsion furniture: phallic dress, 
shoes, 
armchair, 
rowboat, phallic protrusions
jutting from the female form,
obliteration of phallic phobia, repetition 
designed to conquer aversion.

The sixteen-year-old girl has seen only one 
human phallus, that of a man too old for her.

I disliked sex and he was impotent,
so we suited each other very well.

The girl is puzzled at how Kusama thus explained 
her relationship with Joseph Cornell, 

who, at sixty, first kissed her—
first kissed any woman. 
They were passionate/platonic, unlikely
allies who sketched each other in the nude.
His mother doused them with cold water; 
nevertheless, he phoned Kusama daily.

The sixteen-year-old girl’s teacher, who has taken
a special interest (her disrobed older man), 
phones her daily, shows her 
a famous photograph, 

young Kusama, gorgeous, stylish, an object 
of desire who lies on a sofa covered 
with hundreds of upholstered erections. 

There were/are wars going on.

Despite her proclivity for celibacy, Kusama
offered Richard Nixon sex, 
if only he’d stop the war in Vietnam. 

The sixteen-year-old girl tries to imagine 
the institution, the Seiwa Hospital 
for the Mentally Ill, in Japan, where the artist 
has chosen to live for forty years.

I will tell you about the freedom of self-obliteration, 
of nothingness, the sculpture whispers. 
The girl, 
a voyeur of hallucinations, obsessions,
acute inspiration, 
studies the sweet license to be aberrant,
decides to dive in. 

___________________

SUSANA H. CASE is the author of seven books of poetry. Her most recent, Dead Shark on the N Train, was released in 2020 from Broadstone Books. Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press) won an IPPY Award in 2019. She is also the author of five chapbooks, two of which won poetry prizes, and most recently, Body Falling, Sunday Morning, from Milk and Cake Press. 

These poems were previously published in Owl Light Literary: Turning Points 2021.