now don't you feel base, or for coarser beauty
by Mark Parsons
A woman lots of men and women consider
Beautiful, a woman
Lots of men and lots of women
Consider—if not beautiful, then attractive,
And if
Not attractive,
Then feel attracted to—
A woman to whom more than just
A few
Men and women feel drawn.
However, because of the over-stated quality
Of her
Gaudy beauty,
The men and women, feeling so
Attracted, never think to acknowledge, or even deny this
Visceral attraction.
How beauty—real, ostentatious,
Genital-numbing beauty—both repels and fascinates,
Sickens and captivates.
*
When you're so…
Beautiful,
When you're that
Beautiful,
And with no
Subtlety
To your beauty,
No one can see
You're only beautiful,
That you’re
Nothing
But your beauty.
The people around you—
Because of you
They hover, suspended between desire
And nauseating vertigo,
Disgusted with themselves for wanting to
Be in greater proximity
To this female who corresponds—
A kind of archetype—to some viscera inside them.
The feature that triggers
Could be your body or face,
The line of your jaw or texture of your skin,
The defiant tilt back of your head and prominent chin,
The hollowed-out sweep of your inner thigh in soft faded denim
That's taut but not skin-tight,
The low wedge heel of your blue leather mule
Hooked on the bottom rung of the bar stool your soon-to-be
One night stand is sitting in—
Might utter (words,
Expressed in words): How dare
You—! Or,
Less imperious, warn
Him: the closer you get, the longer you
Persist, the more they will
Shun you.
Not used to such beauty,
Beauty you can’t look away from,
Beauty like a wound making your mouth dry,
Beauty like the sickly sweet smell of decomposing flesh,
Beauty like a glistening red
Garnet abscess
The sight of which causes your mouth to flood
With saliva you have to make a deliberate, conscious effort to swallow,
Because it goes against every instinct you have,
Beauty like ligature marks on her wrists and neck your waiter can't help but notice
At a romantic candlelight dinner for two,
Beauty like the chain-link vermilion cross-hatching of self-harm scars
On the dimpled, downy expanse of inner thighs,
Beauty that makes you want to vomit like the smell of vomit makes you want to vomit,
Beauty like a wine red-to-black scab you pick
Around the edge,
Needing to see what's underneath,
But there's nothing underneath you haven't already seen,
Beauty like a punch in the stomach, bending you in half to crumple on the floor,
Which stinks of stale beer and rainy sidewalks.
Not accustomed to such beauty
As you yourself possess, command,
You’ll never understand
Why people around
You remain a captive audience
To the engrossing details of your daily life,
Until the day when you’re finally able to appreciate
In a detached objective way
The dissonant aura that so long surrounded you.
BIO: Mark Parsons' poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in Ex Pat Press, Dreich, Cape Rock, and I-70 Review. His books include, Stills (Southernmost Books in 2023), Lake Tahoe is an Elegy (chapbook, Alien Buddha Press, 2024), Spiral (Anxiety Press, 2025), and The Kingdom of Middle of Children (Southernmost Books, forthcoming, summer 2025). He lives in Tucson, Arizona.