Valentines: Two Pieces by Rhoni Blankenhorn

Pasiphaë

My hair with the dog shampoo 

again in a house 

that doesn’t belong to me. 

A lover who knows nothing about balance

(not saying I do) 

tells me this fucks 

with the hair’s pH.

So, I use it on purpose 

and am delighted, remembering 

all the good dogs I’ve known,

and all the good houses.

“Take off your mouth,” 

I bark at a lover

while wearing their clothes. 

We kiss until my eyes turn red

from embarrassment.

Tao Po, I Am At the Door

Small enough, woman,
white enough. I slip through,
leave daddies wanting
to kiss my combination of stardust
and vortex. I’m part American craving 
sampaguita dialysis, part
heat rising from a city sliced 
by a dirty ribbon. 
I’m a boxer on Burgos
with teeth for a cunt. 
I swallow the sun-
aged embryos of birds
every morning to prepare
for the knife’s edge. Not your blood,
I am steamed rice
the color of the moon 
in your mirror. I'm running
my reverberant tongue around the shell 
of your earlobe, my spit
a shout louder than god, 
and I have the advantage of proximity. 
I am already inside, breathing.

About Rhoni Blankenhorn

Rhoni Blankenhorn is a Filipina American writer. Her debut, Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet, won the Trio Award, and is forthcoming from Trio House Press in summer 2025. A Sewanee scholar and a Saltonstall fellow, her work can be found or is forthcoming in Narrative, AAWW, Couplet, Mercury Firs and elsewhere. She serves on the advisory board for the87press.