the white album
On Melrose two maltese puppies
yank a woman with a living sunburn by the leash
Her nails brilliant in shellac, in chroma
At the artist’s talk I learn the female body
in space is just the record of her becoming, caulked
at the edges
I have moved here to stall the record of my becoming
On the plane ride I googled Skid Row,
a list of salad joints, crime rates, lesbian bars
I free bleed in Whole Foods
I smell myself everywhere
In this nylon one-piece I am small enough to be brilliant,
small enough to survive
If a girl in a nylon one piece takes her body
her hair and her big mouth to the river
If a girl takes her poems and sour grapes to the desert
If the desert is the unremitting joystick of need
If the joystick is a compass
If the joystick is a dildo
If she is fucking her trajectory
If she is limp like a doll with the West Coast inside her
On the plane I google walkability, a list
of gyms for the shy, drought statistics
Where are the angels
I lie to James at the noodle place
I say the food’s not bad
I say I’m a vegetarian
I say you wouldn’t believe the person I was
Living on the farm with my father and my milk and my two braids
Being real with the crows, feeding them
Where are the angels
At The Standard the epiphanies glut me
I am so fat with them
but I don’t tell anyone I am a poet
When I cannot pay my tab they know, they know
I ask where are the coyotes
Have they camped out behind the Hollywood sign
Stalking the mansions tearing at their meat
Beverly Hills Coyote I say, everyone laughing
Me making a good first impression
Hiding a gem in a bomb without burning the trees
A coyote steals a baby from his mother
and takes him to the mountains
If a baby takes his body to the mountains
If he takes it to the hills
If his body’s like plush in the animal’s mouth
No I haven’t yet seen a coyote
Haven’t seen a dog like that, a dog with a heart so cruel,
so full of sand and heat, a heart like a rattle
Everywhere I go I carry a knife for I am in fear
Rebecca (Reba) Beauchamp is a poet & digital artist based in Washington DC whose work deals with such topics as informatics and cyberfeminism, queer representation, and thinspo mythologies. She is the founder of the biannual online exhibition/video-based magazine Advanced. She is author of the e-books Necessity of Foreplay (Gauss PDF) and Poems About Bulimia (Hysterically Real). She can be found@ http://rebabeauchamp.com.