Muse  |  Katie Kidder

Oh, it's so bad

to get stuck with a muse you don't want.

Why couldn't I have been assigned Bobby Frost's muse,

or someone with something like grace? 

Mine belches and scratches her ass in the hall.

She has the sickly sweet smell of children   

and stale Nilla Wafers, as though she was sprung

from the foam of the sofa.  

She grabs at my smokes during the two-point conversion,

and she swims in my wine like a gnat.

I trip over her, by the bed, reading Plath on the floor

at six in the morning when I get up for tea.

My muse is nothing like me. 

She waxes perverse in the thighs of thin blondes  

when we've a perfectly good blonde at home.

And that bitch burns my old lovers' letters

and makes up her face with the ashes. 

Kissing my muse, I imagine,

is like swallowing a mouthful of honey and rust,

and twisting your legs in her legs in the cold comfort of dark

is like spooning, in the sea, on the rag, with a shark. 

My muse works with the mercy of bullets, falling.  

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