WAFFLESDEAD-END ROADSKIDSCitations: Waffles: A found poem from: King, Stephen. Cujo. Viking Press, 1981. P. 105. Dead-End Roads: A found poem from: King, Stephen. Cujo. Viking Press, 1981. P. 296. Kids: A found poem from: King, Stephen. Cujo. Viking Press, 1981. P. 27. ✱✱✱
Nanny’s Georgia peach kitchen Fog the same consistency as one cup of half-and-half My sweat congealing in the valleys of my palms Nanny showing me to slice onions from front to back Listening to boiling potatoes hiss Sprinkling basil leaves onto lily pads of fat Measuring off ham into streamers of pink and white marble Adding lots of cheddar Locking it into tupperware Carrying it home to my sick mother Feeding her the medicine of her own childhood Remembering the recipe for my own children ✱✱✱
NOTES ON SILENCElosing my headphones in school didn’t feel very nice but i like it now that i’ve gotten used to not having the endless stream of sound i don’t ever listen to- (like, really listen to)- to fill up every second. there is so much empty time and so much clarity when the buzz is cleared and i never noticed it slipping through my fingers, flowing like water, i don’t understand where i let the years pass by without ever realizing where they went, the whirlwind and commotion of life engulfing me, time moving like waves back and forth all i ever think about anymore is how the years move so swiftly without a letter, without a call, not a single text of warning to me like hey it’s over we’re over the next one is near, maybe you should worry less about me maybe you should work on listening to this one, maybe i forgot how to keep my feet on the ground and feel the earth beneath me after so many years of being uprooted from everything that mattered, i think i was so swept up by it all i forgot to watch out for the birds warbling and the crunching of shoes stepping on leaves and all the shades of the sky between dusk and dawn and all the sweet, wonderful words i feel like i heard only in my head i think i needed to listen to the universe for once, let it know i was okay and things were okay and that i can still hear it all i can still hear the buzz in my mind that wills me to live i can still hear the humming of my own heart. and that it matters. DREAM DEFERREDi had a dream once or twice, i think my memory’s hazy these days i still remember every word you said to me like they were etched in mind i remember your face lit by the glow of the moon. first contact i’ve had in 29 days 5 hours 14 minutes was a mirage. even in the fog of my mind i remember how you never keep your hands still even in mine they tremble like leaves and i remember myself wondering as i did so many times before who took away your tenderness. i look for signs where i shouldn’t and see gradation in glass as clear as day and i’d trade in every vision i’ve seen for this to be more than just brainwaves i will the universe to let it come true but all i hear is radio silence what is it about old hurts that makes us always return to them. what is it about old truths that makes us always forget them ✱✱✱
what do you do when you can see them but they don’t see you? sip the oil from the top of the vinaigrette through your labrum — quick, before it’s shaken squeeze through the gap below the bedroom door into the early sunrise conversations, then whisper their secrets to the kitten leave the spoon in the sink, handle caked with instant coffee powder when the arguments start, push a can of tuna off the fourth shelf from the bottom. watch them jump at the clatter of aluminum. the French-cut green beans are next — exacerbate what you can you don’t need their blood or the guts of the open sugar packets left out on the counter they don’t see you — pull it all apart — because you can ✱✱✱
cactus tongue Or scooter Gang radish-land calls. drive, they the hive. Of Jacks & Jills &. cheap Thrills. in so-Mo twEg. I go walking, in walls. Great Hands. That's. what happens when I stick 'round as promised, the Castle evaporates. i make a few notes, fake cigarette Maps guides me but drains coretto stuns. come for me. now & drives the mulberry nipples All over his lithe vodka bubbling for/to the lights. ✱✱✱
THINGS IN THROATSThere is something stuck in my throat and when I cough it swells and when I swallow it sticks. I think it’s made of matches or the little plastic toys from a gumball machine. It tastes like childhood, the years between eight and eleven, when there are too many elbows and scabby knees and the future hangs like a dust cloud. But when I’m sleeping and the darkness is two fists over my eyes it feels like something else. Something swollen. Something to palpate. Something that needs looking after. Something like the drainage ditch behind the field where the flowers don’t grow and the deer won’t walk and the dog always whines and that one time you went over the fence through the brambles across the puddles and met the man with the cement eyes and the rough fingers and learned that things in throats don’t need sunlight to grow. PAPER CUTThe bougainvillea in our garden are wild, their pink petals a most somber cliché. A rigid knuckle of sky stamps them down, splaying, splitting, plundering. Guts and obscenity flood the yard. Cat piss dog shit beautiful day. We begin by discussing Asger Jorn. We end by debating who is the bigger cunt, while the dying dog sleeps at our feet. We speak in rhyme and unreason and sometimes un-rhyme and excuse. We speak in permanent dissolution, dissention between periods; semicolons between our legs. Poetry is fundamentally unappealing. Alienating. I don’t remember if you said that or if it was just implied when I took my notebook and went to sit outside beneath the spangled clouds of ugly nothings. They bloom even when we forget to water them. Fertile fucking rebuke. The pages of my notebook fall open and I finger their edges, searching for a paper cut. ✱✱✱
A SMALL LIST OF THINGS I WOULD USUALLY HIDEwhy do we hide under blankets why do we hide our feelings why do we hide easter eggs hiding is the pragmatic response to fear of losing something i hide a 73% seventy-three percent of the time we are not what we project ourselves to be seventy-three percent is the amount of time i spend trying to retain consciousness seventy-three percent of men talk down to me when talking politics in that 73% i also include hiding - pretending to like eric clapton - imagining having a threesome in which i didn’t feel insecure or "worse than the other person” - not feeling part of a generation - the dream that who we were on mdma was the real self - our relationship having network connectivity problems - fake orgasms - and every time i have felt unnecessarily exposed i am afraid of the time spent in a station, right before a train approaches and it feels like the air it carries is going to hit you in the face i always stand close to the platform because i want to find out how much of it i can feel i am afraid of the insides of a plant it takes a much larger amount of time to kill a plant than to kill yourself every cell in a plant is independent to its other cells every cell in a plant is unaware of your existence every cell in a plant dies alone desynchronised with its co-cells but every cell in my body will die holding hands i am afraid of babies i am afraid of babies feeling sad when they realise that at one time nothing will be new or astounding or special i am afraid of not covering their osmotic heads with bubblewrap so they can’t be penetrated with hurt i am afraid you will think this is stupid i am afraid that people can have opinions on other people when they will never live inside another human being’s head ihide my fear of walking home alone at night and my nostalgia for what never existed most of all i hide that i don’t want to be thrown away I AM SEVERAL WOMENmy blood is sin entering the world my blood is a ravenous animal leashed inside me my blood is a living painting my blood is a city with no men in it my blood is uninhibited abandon and hormonal cattiness my blood is victory my blood is a thousand witches chanting around a pink fire my blood is like spitting in someone else’s mouth my blood is what you are afraid of my blood is not made of glitter my blood is made of every time i have been raped and every woman i have ever met it makes me daring it makes me solid it makes me strong my blood is the only real thing i am my blood is an ocean you don’t tell the ocean to behave YOU MADE MY CHEST FEEL LIKE AN EMPTY CAR PARKwe drive apologetically while i place myself in the center of a foreign place. this place speaks. its voice offers no consecration. it says many things about nothing. it says: “this feels warm in the way setting things on fire feels warm”. it says: “i am so scared to lose you i can’t feel your body next to my body”. it says: “i no longer feel like a poem. i can’t live inside you forever”. it repeats everything i always say in a way you’ve never heard before. i tried to push through the waters of a lake instead i ended up here. you were the sky before the sky was a sky of unglued ghosts. i am looking at your body reflecting the moon. i am recording this. i am thinking: “i exist i exist i exist”. i am thinking: “say something i will remember”. there are two hundred dogs dying right now. our hands have engaged in the most vulnerable connection. everything is happening so much. we are two tsunamis of nostalgia splash-fighting each other with baby-sized dinosaur arms. we are an abandoned fair, left untouched for five years, its lights still painfully lit. we can't be together lest we eat each other. we wish for painless separation, for our fingers merging with the sky in the middle of a rainstorm with thunder, and for the way we could sleep before we knew things about each other. i will draw new eye sockets on your face. staring at me will feel infinite. ✱✱✱
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Branches bare, the sea sprinkled with jewels of leaves sun-burnt, glistened near white and blue horizon lines, faded pink skies, clouds glided intimately over moorlands, slowly turning their faces to a wide spectrum of the sea, yellow and brown hues scattered over grounds. the transition to damper climes were heard in the sea's roar, birds flocked hither-tither above deciduous trees, they perched over a vacant bough — one evening of mist ✱✱✱
What can I possibly give you today? Not much. Only a spray of flowers. I’ll leave them by your door and through your tears you’ll see white lilies and lavender and baby’s breath, scooped from a pond of mermaids. There’ll be red flowers too: scarlet, majestic, like blood staining tissue. I'll wrap them simply so you’ll pick them up and hold not fancy curls and foil but just a sheath of flowers, like a child, like a farmer holds wheat. I'll write your name on a scrap of parchment and drench it in dyes of maroon and amber and saffron, like the sunset we know is coming and I’ll sprinkle it with nutmeg and cinnamon and through your pain and fury and harrowing loneliness you’ll know you are loved. ✱✱✱
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