Poetry – Page 16 – swamp pink

Open the Fire Hydrants

November 14, 2022

After Jericho Brown Summer is the season of longing. In dreams of the childhood home it’s burning. In the childhood home my father burns. I dressed like a boy when they let me. I dressed like a boy when they let me out of the house I fell in love with girls. The house fell...

Internal Dissident

November 14, 2022

I was born with a cudgel & a mole on my cheek. When the fog told my mother her name was dead, I crushed the fog with my milk teeth. I knew the blister of annihilation before I scraped soot from my gums. I was born so I belly-crawl. I was born to refuse to...

Fieldnotes

November 14, 2022

right before my nana died i bought her a neko case cd. nana clung to music like a mother’s neck when her mind dipped out and her body went to town on tunes. nana was a fucking riot and ya know what, i’m rioting too. i’m spending $120 on SKIMS. i’m filing my nails into...

Tea for Two Cha Cha

November 14, 2022

You turn on the radio and it’s Xavier Cugat and his orchestra. You plan to go gently throughout your day, but why not do a little shimmy on the way to the kitchen. The morning is warm, dog kisses are free, and the soft, pillowy bun has a surprise slice of cheese in the middle....

The Still Hours

November 14, 2022

In the garden, inexplicably dead without a scratch, a fawn is a kind of secret. I crane my neck like a doe, searching for someone behind the trees to want him. Maybe someone watches to see if I want him. Odd offering, he is knotted like a silk scarf in the ivy. (My secret is...

folklore

November 14, 2022

I say, there would be no folklore without Astral Weeks and Louisa says dads everywhere would click on that— still unwritten—article and send it to their daughters as proof from another daughter, that Taylor Swift is the saltwater taffy that strains the jaw as you eat, as you decide if you even like waxy sugar....

there

September 21, 2022

is a woman, a negotiation of space— the red line of vitals now partitioned. is she tired the intake, for an entire house, her hands, make-shift, wash negotiate the lint of cobwebs. she is kept inside. a house in ruin. an entire house within her chest shingles, banisters, double paned & the smallest of spaces....

Tiger, Tiger

………….I ran into a famous young poet, the tall one with large blonde hair swept to the side. ………….I asked him what he was working on. He said he was reading and thinking about tigers, naming several books with “tiger” in their titles. ………….He asked if I had any recommendations of good tiger texts. ………….I...

Ghazal for a Fast, Black Girl Gazing from a Locked Window

My parents left my ballooning body in a small town filled with white pro-lifers, a man-made lake, room & board, food labels black and white. I am fed food pantry goulash and Buckeye confections on football days. Taught catch-up credits by volunteers who look like nuns—old and white. There are other lessons too, like God...

This Kind of Hunger

And how else to exit the year …………but with the wet entering every orifice, its cold clear teeth biting …………into my skin softened like a bolus. Your body on the balcony beside …………me, gummed of its meat. Because that’s what the year has done …………to us—sucked us slick as a rib. And what a clearing....

The Owl of Winter

It is in the half light that you awaken …………as at the end of an age, spread your feathers, sift the dusky air with tips of your wings, …………and move into the spaces of silence clarified of the day’s blared garishness …………—aloft, yet scouring the earth’s curvature with such purity of intention known …………only to...

Pluto

I’m sorry. It was a minor matter. All the ways that I was here and the ways I wasn’t. A sticky black key in your polyphonic arrangement. The silence above the soprano. Ambivalent stopwatch. The silt that accretes under the fingernails, at once aging and new. What was I to you? My rural blood has...