2 poems by natasha burge

THINGS IN THROATS

There 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 CUT

The 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. 

✱✱✱

Natasha Burge is a writer, psychogeographer, and curator who lives on the shores of the Arabian Gulf. She is the writer-in-residence at the Qal'at al-Bahrain Museum and is currently working on her first novel. Her writing can be found in Pithead Chapel, The Establishment, Vagabond City, Jersey Devil Press, and Pidgeonholes, among others. More of her work can be seen at www.natashaburge.com