3 poems by june gehringer

6/28/2017

EARTH IS AN ANAGRAM FOR HEART, U FUCKING IDIOTS

I.

This is all wrong.

We should be talking about how there’s a nine-year-old smiling somewhere.

We should be saying the names of all the people we have loved and never known like those words are a magic spell, because they are.

I don’t want to hear another word about Trump until you have whispered the names of all ~50,000 species of trees in my ear.

Sext: there are so many flowers you haven’t seen.

II.

The world comes to us in terms of death,
140 characters at a time.

I don’t want to talk about it.
I want to lie in what little grass remains
and try to fit your heart inside of mine.

But soon there is no grass,
and the function of the heart is transportation.
Soon, there is no grass anywhere,
and love is not enough.

I don’t know how to stop the flight of a tomahawk,
I’m busy building houses out of colored sand.

I am such a useless thing.

III.

None of this belongs to me or anyone.

I was simply born with more eyes
than could be made comfortable,
I was born with blood.

I wonder if it is possible to bury myself. Each day
more than the day before, I wonder
how much blood is in the Earth.

It is time we move, uproot
our budding bodies from the blood-soaked Earth,
it is time to go.

And if there’s not somewhere for us to go
then we’ll make somewhere,
we’ll move as one toting bags of dirt, a
nd we’ll fucking bury them.

We’ll bury them in Mar-a-Lago and
we’ll bury them in Washington, and
we will bury them in the shopping malls.
We’ll bury them in the oil fields
and in Baton Rouge, and in the Gulf of Mexico.
We will bury the borders and we will bury
the aircraft carriers and we will
even bury skyscrapers: we have earth enough
for this.

We will bury this Earth in earth and
I will love you while we wait
for blood to grow.

SO MUCH GOOD HAS HAPPENED AND

almost none of it was me.

there are entire forests which are single
organisms, hundreds of trees joined
only at the root.

guess what they look like?

they look like regular forests.
they’re fucking beautiful.

everyone i love
looks the same
when i am looking
at the sky,

✱✱✱

June Gehringer is a co-founder of tenderness, yea. She tweets @unlovablehottie and she loves u, like, a lot.