When we say canapé we mean something else,
an edible thing to hold you up until the next meal.
Hers meant a sofa with extensions
shaped as body parts sewn to it,
all upholstered in tweed.

A friend from Mexico wore tweed jackets and vests
even in the warmest months, take March for instance.
If it wasn’t tweed it looked like it.
He wrote about memory and died last May, at forty.
In 1999 we sat on a sofa and listened to music.
An Ennio Morricone soundtrack cracked us up.
He was the type you’d think ate canapés.
He drank more than he ate,
and ended up crawling back into the walls;
his form of DT.

Tweed as his surrogate self.
The sofa was the bread, we the meats on top.
Might have chewed on each other.
Swallowed by time, he was the edible one.
You can do whatever you want,
I was told by a dealer with a crook’s reputation.
What if I don’t know.
You always do, said another man.
Artists: Express surprise that they dress like everyone else.

The artist knows what her tweed figures—
anachronisms in the age of self-lubricating vaseline
frames—
are doing.

###

Mónica de la Torre is the author of six books of poetry, including The Happy End/All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Feliz año nuevo, a volume of selected poetry translated into Spanish by Cristián Gómez (Luces de Gálibo) forthcoming in the spring of 2017. Born and raised in Mexico City, she translates poetry, writes about art, and is a contributing editor to BOMB Magazine. Recent publications include Triple Canopy, Harper’s, Poetry, Erizo, and huun: arte / pensamiento desde México. She teaches in the Literary Arts program at Brown University.

“On Eroticism and Cutting Fabric” by Monica de la Torre originally appeared in BOMB Magazine, Issue 98, Winter 2007