Jessica Scicchitano

Jessica Scicchitano, from "Prepare This Place for Bed"

“….One October long ago the singsong

of trick-or-treat made me so aware of the body,

how our homes are our body, how you’re choosing another

body. Barns in my hands, bobby pins—my whole body

is a womb. Prepare this place for bed.


My mother calls and says she’s going to the Frick this weekend, as if everyone

knows what the Frick is, the cross streets, its smell of manure

the horse carriages leave behind.

I feel like my body hasn’t left that moment long ago

when my mother opened her mouth and pain flew in,

how synonymous it became to vulnerability. Waiting for this train,

I am and am not a woman, in a suit.”

Orchestrated Moan

Pills dangle from every mouth at the opera house while I tell myself
to get out of the way, get out of the aisle, get out of my
own mind. I know the composers have sex, the orchestra, everyone up there.
I know by the disintegrating formula
in the smallest echo of vibrato, soprano an antonym of stutter,
no place safer than another.

Look, these performers have lost their heads, shrive
with patented mechanical instruments
only living when handled by a human being.
I am terrible in first person, a less-successful ornament
next to the hands of a woman pulling her mouth
open wide as advertisement.
She belts the Italian for “half the trouble you get into
comes from coming,” our drug’s half-life, our wide-set pupils,
our performances, our aural and erotic poisons.

Goodbye powerful scales, I have been experimenting with tenderness
and I seem to have forgotten
what I wanted this poem to consist of,
love?

- Jessica Scicchitano

For N:

New York City:
Shh, I know your troubles with Bastille Day,
ten days before my birthday.
We celebrate by burnt wine, meat,
illegal fireworks, high pigment lipstick
taxied ‘round Columbus Circle,
attach artifice, paint avenue,
bludgeon, blow open.
I can’t continue, with you.
I tirelessly fill casts shaped of your promenades,
beaks of West End highway crows, drips, drip,
they dazzle cold.
Blood and steam took conversation,
chose stolen scissors to
gnaw the quick of intention from
our bewilderment. I sculpt ash from dead
lightning bugs armed with machine guns
that pump you plump with
an afterthought of smolder.
Washington Square,
mouth your afterthought.
The dedicated gestation of
going down on a graveyard
are drowned in the fountain
of Lincoln Center, and its scent
of masticated raspberries
fill the bronze tub, an ocean,
an aggregate of washed-up syringe,
the hi-def zoom on an ex-seafoam pixel
and a sun-fucked version of wood.

- Jessica Scicchitano, first published in the “Corresponding Voices” Anthology

Mondrian Tissue Box

And I thought only characters in film alternated between
laughter and tears in the shower when it thundered.

When it was my turn to cry, I bent my head
and closed my eyes and the colors were a diaspora.

I spent a lot of time deciphering twigs from worms.
My horoscope says many Leos will die today. Another horoscope

says strut your stuff. That a whole generation
won’t know the sound of a rotary dial in their ear.

I swallow and think of who you last loved; bent over the way I am
I bend my head to take her into me. You will experience a Disintegration.

If there is anything to be known about obsession,
it is to say by staring, I could take her into me.

I’ve stared at someone’s name for that long,
the tears decrescendo, sunset shampooed and alive.

Mondrian doll faces in the grime of the window, Botticelli shoulders
mermaids and anime girls with pearl earrings.

It’s 10:36: I was born at this time. You will
laugh as the thunder comes. Your mind will wring you dry.

- Jessica Scicchitano (first published in Columbia Journal)