Craving the Gravure

Relentless, her appetite for life in black and white.
The way she devours Victorian images like doily-bordered
chocolates, one after another, until every plate is cleaned.
Even period woodblock stamps she licks to slivered ends,
their ridges etching her tongue red and blue, a slick
metaphor for the era’s purple prose and postcards
of families cinched in their parlor best. The black-bulb
view of virtue is what she really craves, violet portraits
in locket frames, shrunken heads under glass, fetishes
she may pet again and again.

Maureen Kingston is an assistant editor at The Centrifugal Eye. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gargoyle, Stone Highway Review and Terrain.org. A few her recent prose pieces have been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart awards.