Kate Bernadette Benedict is our October 2009 Featured Poet

You can email Kate at kate.bernadette.benedict@gmail.com

The Make-Up Artist

Your mother tells me there will be a prize tonight for best costume.
Therefore I have modified my formulations.

Let’s start with that cascading hair of yours.
This I.V. should do the trick.
By noon, every strand will have ditched its root and fallen.

The special body paint I have concocted will tickle you pink.
Pink then red then grey then blister white.
The stringent diets have made my job much easier.
So little meat on you already!
It should melt away quite nicely.
There, all done.
We’ll let it set awhile before a second application.

Only the finest acids for your face, my pretty,
only the most delicate brushes!
For this step, I like to take my time,
admiring each orbital and zygomatic as it slowly surfaces.

Of flesh, only the orbs remain.
A few squirts of Japanese eye whitener
will clear the blood out nicely.
I always keep it in stock.

Over to the mirror now
then over to the scale.
See: it barely registers.
It’s the costume of your dreams, isn’t it?
How your mum will aah and ooh;
and the other kids,
how they will point their fingers and halloo.

All Hallow's Eve

Orange cellophane, jet black tulle:
what is that child supposed to be?
The little princesses and cowboys
won't go near her.

She doesn't do the monster mash.
She doesn't sing-along or apple-bob
or dip a grabby hand into the candy dish.
She's off in her own world, whirling.

Clever costume, though,
the mushroom cloud of tulle so finely fashioned,
those cellophane streamers standing straight up,
snapping and sparking.
Fiber optics must be threaded in there somehow.

A pall over everything.
The punch bowl's dry,
the dry ice isn't sublimating.
They're playing musical chairs
but the music doesn't stop.
No interlude, no scrambling.
No child left out.

Sad Cases

"Freaks?" That is a term of no utility anymore.
These persons are different, that's all.
Different. Chant it like a mantra
as you pad around the wards.

Here is one with a leg for a body.
There, in its crib,
a gelatinous little plug of a thing, no face.
Another opens mouth to thumb—
yes, that is a mouth, that a thumb.

It's good you've come.
It was lonely, being the only volunteer.
Today the tasks are simple enough.
We'll be handing out toy homunculi
and boxes of organelles
and one lucky tyke will get a skinsuit.

Come meet the philanthropists, the conjoined twins.
They hold court every Sunday.
They're always nude: it delights the incurables.
All this is their doing.

Night Terrors Happen in the Rift of Time

Between scream and vision, the second splits.
Between vision and scream, eternity.

The pit in the floor is your personal abyss,
the lash of the flamethrower your destiny.

Between the burn and the lit lamp, eternity.

A gargoyle slouches at your narrow bed,
inhaling your exhalations,
disappearing in that nanosecond
between the stopped lung
and the found and fought-for breath.

Are you fighting your own breath?

Tonight, they will materialize,
the warriors in loincloths,
to impale you with their atavistic spears.

Between the heart hoisted on a spear
and the heart thrashing at a rib, what eon elapses?

What second splits as the viper comes for you,
the mouthparts of the mantis take you whole?

The Wild Party

Here you are. Thank God, you’re here!
I have bruises from being jostled and manhandled so.
These aren’t nice people.
They swig rotgot from jugs and puke in the pansy beds.
Look at that one, her cherry sneer.
And that one, forming horns with his fingers, so low class!
Why won’t they get in their wagons and be out of here?
Any minute now, Mrs. Backus next door will call the police.

Any minute now, this rowdiness will be riot,
shrieking, a shredding of garments,
a pulling of limbs from sockets.
Look at cousin Vera, her contortion,
her fanatical, feral eye.

Kate Bernadette Benedict is the author of the full-length poetry collection Here from Away and the editor of Umbrella: A Journal of Poetry and Kindred Prose. She has worked in the fields of book publishing and finance and lives in New York City. Most of the poems included here are from Night Queue, a collection in progress of archetypal dream scenarios. Visit her on the web: http://www.katebenedict.com