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    Velvet Hounds: poems
    Velvet Hounds: poems
    Velvet Hounds: poems
    Ebook118 pages58 minutes

    Velvet Hounds: poems

    By Aimee Seu

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    About this ebook

    Velvet Hounds is a completely combustible collection of poetry. In extravagant, shape-shifting imagery and mythic-meets-black-leather vernacular, Seu takes readers on a journey through reckless youth, first love, addiction, bliss, agony and mayhem. Velvet Hounds is a semi-autobiographical collection bearing reckless witness, with nothing held back, to the wreckage bulimia nervosa makes of a body and spirit as well as the pain and personal schisms from which such a disorder might stem. In Velvet Hounds, Seu also delves into the difficulties of growing up the biracial, pansexual, wayfaring child of a deceased pastor and fundamentalist Christian writer mother. The book chronicles the effects of her mother's and her own wavering mental health and through that lens, the incoherent and dangerous labyrinth two people's psychosis can create when they collide. From impassioned, ecstatic, abstracted odes like G-Spot, “strongroom, throne room of baritone ache” & Clitoral “Sinewed capsule / of holy spirit. My body, / the electric chair / berserk.” To the clarity and searing vulnerability of narrative sequences like the long poem “Ox Hunger Essay” which chronicles different thresholds in the narrators struggle with death, betrayal, bulimia, and the isolation of identity “I developed a habit of wringing / my stomach out in my throat.” Never shying away from the erotic, visceral, nightmarish or any juiced-up phantasmagorical earthly heaven, Velvet Hounds is a thunderstorm you'll lose yourself inside.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Akron Press
    Release dateMar 2, 2022
    ISBN9781629222233
    Velvet Hounds: poems

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      Book preview

      Velvet Hounds - Aimee Seu

      PART I

      And as she slep, anonright tho hire mette

      How that an egle, fethered whit as bon,

      Under hire brest his longe clawes sette,

      And out hire hert he rente, and that anon,

      And dide his hert into hire brest to gon,

      Of which she nought agroos, ne nothyng smerte;

      And forth he fleigh, with herte left for herte.

      —Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde

      Book II, lines 925-931

      I don’t mind livin’

      I don’t mind givin’ it up.

      —Grapetooth, Trouble

      FAMILY PORTRAIT WITH CADILLAC ENGULFED IN FLAMES

      My mother lost track of the time

      playing in the kingdom of tall grass with me,

      light passing incandescent through that swaying

      frothing wheat. On the ride home

      she flipped the tape over, sang

      Nights in white satin, beauty I’d always missed

      a mourning dove cooing as she carried

      me up to bed. Days when we would cheer

      if the car started. Women in the movies were

      always cold, angelic collarbones begging you

      to drape your jacket around them.

      Love was a china doll my father

      tied with string and let drag from the trunk

      of his car as he went. Let dangle from the wing

      of a plane. So I should’ve known better.

      But in my heart, I already had a jacket I’d shrug off

      to give anyone. In all my memories, he coughs

      blood into tissues and shoves them deep

      in his pockets. Looks at me knowing

      we wouldn’t know each other.

      Behind him, a Cadillac engulfed in flames.

      At fifteen my brother was already an addict

      robbing gas stations to buy cocaine—picture him,

      black bandana tied over a face without stubble. To think

      I was kicking him on the couch in my footsie pajamas.

      My sister, cast in frigid diamond

      every few seconds by the strobe light,

      crystal embedded in her tongue that she used

      to charm cobras, the word LOVE carved

      into her arm with a box cutter. And while the gods

      locked them in the garage and broke

      hockey sticks over their shoulders,

      I was talking to windowsill ladybugs.

      Brother who snuck in to slip cash

      into my mother’s purse after she kicked him out.

      Bought a new car with blood money, torched

      the old one and rolled it into the canyon.

      We don’t sell for parts, he said. If I had

      my own holiday we’d drag undercovers

      out of their houses and burn them at the stake.

      Because who could make a career of betrayal?

      Grandmother, my heathen saint, smoking Virginia

      Slims in a stained robe, in the sacred alcove

      of TV light. It’s over now, and no one

      will have ever seen you weep.

      I like to laugh at the families in white button ups

      and blue jeans kneeling in the reeds where a frail

      dune fence trails off, they smile uneasily for the camera,

      everyone holding each other in vain.

      I know lovers are supposed to become family

      but my mother’s love is a hard act to follow.

      Who could ever be so desperate for me,

      so absolute? She was either twisting

      us daisy chain crowns in the baseball field

      in the dew in the morning light, kissing

      all of our names, or she was standing over

      my bed in the night, floor a volcanic spill of candles,

      trying to cast a demon out of my body

      that I was born with, that’s never left.

      What a pussy, my brothers say of pampered Paris

      in a Hollywood remake of the mythic history,

      prince favored unjustly by the gods. We watch

      him fall stupidly through a gnashing battlefield

      as brave men are shredded around him.

      Like me passing through my youth somehow

      unscathed. And now I come to you,

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