Kate Greene
A FLYING SAUCER CLOUD RELIQUARIES THE MOON
And I am not thinking of it
At a distance
I am three women watching three women
Tear open a satyr
Titillated
Obviously
Who among us hasn’t
Impressed upon the stipulated nipple
Wondering how
One must suck
One’s way out
LET’S NOT TALK LOVE
Hands held it
Round like clay
Head thumbs for
Eyes nails moon
Scooping she looked
Augmented with spark-
ly powder
Shining with water
From a formerly
Crème fraîche
You look
Good he said
And I said
Thanks
Anti-aging supple-
ments and cold cream
Important in
This horrors era
A cool
Nightly ritual
For the face the
Capital of
Lovely money
I said you too
PERSONAL SHOPPER
Fort Tryon Park is like a kid’s dream with its stone stairs, paths carved into rock, big rocks, steep drop-offs, and trees. Adults like it too for the Hudson views, the well-maintained gardens, and the Cloisters. Gays also like it for the Cloisters, featuring heirloom plants historically used in potions, vestments of Rome, and medieval convent walls upon which you imagine pushing your lover so as to drop to your knees in prayer and bury your face in her shadow. Or sucking dick. Sucking her dick (in prayer). Also well-hidden paths. Found one recently, and near its inconspicuous entry point was a bundle of sticks one imagines could be easily dragged to conceal so innocents wouldn’t notice the pressed dirt and grass. It made all the men who calmly leaned against the low mossy walls of the stairs leading up to it make sense. The clockmaker had shown itself, so I began to nod as I walked past. Then hold eye contact. Then trace my visual touch from his face down the centerline. The heart. Pause at the crotch. They touched me back. The exact creases pointing toward the exact curve in dark gray jeans touched me indelibly, my heart, and my mouth now slightly open as I think of what came after that first touch on the stairs.
In Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), a guest who may be an angel or a demon is staying with a bourgeois Milanese family. One by one the guest sleeps with the members of the family, including the maid. By the middle of the film, the guest is gone. The first half of the film is seduction, the second half psychosis. The first half is fucking, the second half is real. How one divine fuck will change your life. In the second half the father gives his factory to the workers, strips off his clothes and roams the desert, the mother cruises for sex with young men, the daughter is carried away catatonic, the son paints fevered abstractions, and the maid becomes endowed with an extraordinary spirituality. She returns to her home village where she refuses all food except nettles and levitates above a building. In one of the final scenes, the maid and a companion arrive at a construction site. The maid walks into a pit. Her companion, using a shovel, buries her up to her face. I was reminded of David Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (Face in Dirt). Dusty, dry. Mouth slightly open. A suffocation by place and time, alive, but only for a little while longer. And also eternal. There are two questions. When to unbury what is known and potent. When to bury it again.
Untitled, 3.5x4.25”, Polaroid film Type 600, 2017
Untitled, 3.5x4.25”, Polaroid film Type 600, 2020
Untitled, 3.5x4.25”, Polaroid film Type 600, 2020
Kate Greene is the author of the essay collection ONCE UPON A TIME I LIVED ON MARS (St. Martin’s 2020). She lives in New York.