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SUGAR LE FAE

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The Rusty Toque | Issue 10 | Poetry | June 30, 2016

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LOVE-BITES

To Grayson / Love, Uncle
 
You leave them, like any pup,
on the ones you love.
Blushing rosettes
on your brother’s legs
(like he’d sat on a bottle-cap).
Lipstick welts
on your mother’s neck.
Fork-marks on my fingers.
You’re 14 months
and teething--
what don’t you bite?
It’s the way you laugh
when we scold you
that’s scary.
You’re still giving up
your mouth for the hands
you didn’t know
you have.
In some ways, it’s sad
to have to ask you
to abandon your wolf-brain.
Someday,
if you’re not insane,
we’ll remind you
how you used to bite us,
and laugh.
We’ll tell the true story
of how you were born early
and covered in a fine white fur.

PERSEPHONE'S COMPLAINT

—for Buster
 
Teachers advised me not to
write about technology
in my poetry, but
it’s important to the story
that we typed
most of our affair
             on cell phones--
that our thoughts
had to trudge to the stars
to get from upstairs
to the basement.

SUGAR LE FAE (aka Zach Matteson)  is a prize-winning poet, translator, teacher, photographer, songwriter, and Radical Faerie. His poems, essays, and interviews have appeared in numerous literary journals in Canada and the U.S., including Plenitude, Lemon Hound, and Eleven Eleven. Sugar has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC.