“An Etiquette for Eyes” by Cate Marvin

I don’t know if
l wore glasses
when I met you

but I know
the last time
I saw you

you drank a
drink I bought
you with another

woman who
was far uglier
than I have

ever been. I have brown eyes, did I ever tell you?
Your eyes are too too blue, tell-all awful, and too too
pretty; you make all the girls swoon, and then
lament how harpies pound on your door, plucking
the very shingles off your roof, conducting through
their unanimous will. A plot to kill your hive’s queen,
fix a hose from the car’s tailpipe, to pump barnyard
dread straight into your ken, therefore you demand
I ought never wish to lie in your bed. I have black eyes,

did I tell you? Your eyes are damp blue, fingers in
winter blue, worrying about a prom date blue, never
washed a dish blue. Have I mentioned my eyes are
dead brown, dirt brown, stone brown, done with you
brown, screaming out in the streets I’m so drunk brown,
I’m just ignoring the noise rising up from streets asleep
brown? As in, as brown as dead leaves because my love’s
eyes were dead brown and when he shouted down at
that drunk on the street that New Year’s Eve from

my third floor window that drunk man called him
Whiskey Whore Boy. His eyes were not wish­
wash blue, his eyes were mostly moss and trees,
not mojitos in a barroom, no, his eyes all gin-lit in
a hotel room,  last night were ice-cold, even
in his farewell he was bold, his eyes anyone might
have called plain, but they could at least cry. I am
sick to death of your blue eyes, fabric eyes, flower
eyes. I have brown eyes, plain and seeing eyes behind

thick frames, glassy eyes handing themselves over
to you in buckets. Eyes, dig your hands into my black
soil eyes, my ugly eyes reaching into your eyes for
my twin eyes, look back at me eyes while your eyes
crawl the walls, cloud -blue, wandering off as milky
bosomed maids will look away from the eyes that
seek the crevices deep between their heavy breasts
that sway beneath the cows they bend no milk eyes.
Won’t you have another drink from my silty yonder

eyes? I may look
plain but I’ve got
roses in my blood,

can bloom right
out the soil of these
here brackish eyes,

wander a limb across
the chest of your
country, unlock

the footlocker of your
desire with the tip
of my vine eyes.