Rhoni Blankenhorn
Nothing Elegant
I am not a nun
No I am more simple machinery
I’m wearing my salmon skin tonight
on my red red rug
I enjoy feeling like a fish
The coffee table is made of water
the music turned itself up
I have no taste at all please
don’t hold it against me
My mouth is a stain I am almost certain
everything has meaning
For example a fish is a poultice
a wish Please hold me yes
the lights are on
all my buttons shimmy shining
I am not yet stunk I’m living
This is a serious occasion
Chair Logic
Spinario
In the drawing by Rubens, a boy works
to remove a thorn from the pad of his foot.
He curves over himself, left hand steadying
left leg, while the right hand pinches.
His persistence is ancient. The question mark
of his figure floats like a breath
on the fine ridged paper. There’s a god living
on the corner of West Houston and 6th Ave
who builds worlds out of pipe smoke.
When my father was a god, he played the organ
with his eyes closed until the chords
cracked the cathedral; a ragged blue slit
for his soul to slip through. I pull
an echo from my ribcage and the boy on the wall
shudders. Do not abandon me.
Votive
I fall open on a brisk day
in my long black dress.
I am not burned,
distempered, or otherwise
incomplete.
I have a poet’s anxiety,
which is the shape
of a very small kazoo.
On my walk home, a building’s filigree
gets the best of me.
So many things are clever.
I’m trying to be more honest.
I’m drinking oat milk now.
My favorite flower
changes daily. I realize
an enormous capacity for love
when someone I love dies.
But you already know this.
Before The Butcher Knife
In the photo, the house,
the spidery pine, five kids in line, falling
like the angle of the roof, the girls
gleaming in their dresses and mary janes,
little Patrick standing on someone’s toes,
and you, my father, your hair shining from the teeth
of the comb that dragged through it,
your head tilted down, your bottom lip extended
something I do
saying fuck you, before the word fuck caught fire,
because you were sometimes good
at predicting the future,
you already held the feeling
of the word inside of you, puffing
your twelve-year-old chest
beneath your Christmas sweater,
while your arms stayed stiff
as baseball bats, your palms wet
against your jeans, while the man
behind the camera slurred smile,
ya little cocksucker before pressing
the lever that would catch the downturn
of your jaw, your furrowed brow
something I do too, the furrowing
for the photo, for Grandma, who’d scrawl
1962 Xmas in big, blue ink across the edge,
and on the back, in red script, my grandchildren,
perhaps imagining years later, her progeny
would hold the photo and wonder
who the fuck these people are,
as I am doing now, though I am familiar
with what comes next—the man, and the song
of the big, sharp knife as it cartwheels toward you.
About the Author
Rhoni Blankenhorn is a Filipinx writer from California. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation at Columbia University, where she serves as a Chair’s Fellow, as well as co-Columns Editor for Columbia Journal.