Author: poetryfest

I can’t help but savor you to bits,
Like an idea wedged between
sharpening teeth,,,

The taste a dreamlike quality
That I suckle on

I long to sink into you
My flesh a mere symptom of yours

… I can’t help but gnaw on
your parts unknown

Your eyes affixed to my heart,
Ragged and raw
And true

Every kiss begins with Kay

Every part of you is sacred

That untamed magic of entanglements
Your mouth, the mouth of the wave washing over my eyes

In its magnificence, can you see it?

Your arm,
Of the clock that ticks me to life

I sop up your prose from where your lips part,
Rising and falling, nectar on your tongue

At the tip of your nose is where my love nests,
Upturned to some god-

Nothing is for certain,
But I’m sure about you

First she’s sour, then she’s sweet,
Sickly, even.

Looking me up and down,
I feel her eyes unthreading me.

You’d be surprised how long a breath can last,
I bow my head.

I’m a slut for wearing shorts and a tank top in the summer,
I should change.

When I emerge in my jeans, and 3 quarter sleeve,
I’m suddenly beautiful and modest in the 110 degree weather.

I just need a hug,
I guess I’ll throw some dirt on it and call it a day instead.

Dirt doesn’t fill the hole..

Maybe a snack would help?
She says I’m bored, not hungry.

So instead, I sip on escapism,
In an attempt to convince myself she’s right.

She is right,
Always right,

Never wrong,
Never misremembering.

Her word is law.

She’s a provider, sure,
Of fear, resentment, adversity.

Smothered in delusion,
She tells me it’s my fault.

What is?
“Everything.”
It is absolute.

My lover is so pretty,
Her eyes truly sparkle bright.
I would love to create art to show you,
In charcoal, dark and light.

Or perhaps I’d paint instead,
Maybe a poem would suffice.
Her eyes are so enchanting,
No art could ever be precise.

Nothing can capture her beauty,
Or the lovely flow of her hair.
Her beauty leaves me breathless,
In awe beyond compare.

I couldn’t be more lucky
To have her in my life.
She’s more than just beautiful,
She fills my world with light.

A foreign feeling forming
I have grieved before, but not like this
How can I heal if the hurt hasn’t come yet
But I know exactly when it is

The time between this moment
And the one where you’re set free
Is reduced to days on a calendar
Menacing minutes mocking me

I’d like to indulge in this intimate instant endlessly
Enveloped in your familiar arms
Faint fingers feathering my fearful fringe
Soothing silent suffering

Suddenly, I’m all alone again
Your face fading from view
Because I can’t make a moment stay forever
And the same goes for you

Luck has made you feel above faith
You have control of neither one,
Yet somehow misfortune has passed you by
You’ve nary been tested in a way that would require anything greater than a wallet

Luck would have you believing that you’re too smart for faith,
The latter being something for fools or weaklings

But it is only luck which has shielded you from misfortune
Darling, misfortune is merely late to your station
You’ve never, not yet, whispered love nor gratitude into the ear of one
whose life is being taken before your eyes

Your perfect eyes
They wear bifocals now

My lip trembles as I write, knowing that what has been peppered throughout the lives of some,
will likely befall you en-masse
That your short time left must now accommodate a lifetime of sorrow
How terribly unlucky

When that time comes, and as sure as the sun rises it will,
I ask myself if you’ll look up, or down, or in
If you’ll curse to the sky with a shaking fist
Or if you’ll plead with things unseen

No matter
The otherworldly is not accessible to those who’ve spent such time disbelieving
Your soulagement will be the breathing room that will come in short bursts between
other unfortunate events to follow

Lucky you

Albert Camus wrote that Life is absurd.
That’s what I’m thinking about when I look at her.
I feel the addict gene they told me I have,
somewhere between the tumor and smokey lungs
contorting
to match the mold she’s carved out with her words.
She’s filled me with them,
and she doesn’t even know it.

Life is absurd, I think,
watching her fingertips make lines in the sand
of this background noise.
I see the space around her,
and I see what she takes up of it
and I am envious.

To be jealous of abstraction, is what it is to need her.
To know the vice that holds you,
and to continuously negate seeking a form of virtue
to combat it, is what it is to fall
into something like love.

I am well versed in the aching of it.
This is all familiar, but I don’t mind in the least.
I agree that Life is absurd. And in absurdity
I find a small corner of sanity
that looks something like the crosswalk by my house,
as well as a reason to continue on living.

In Which Mallory Learns Three Important Things
About Herself as She Pinwheels to Death, Among Other Things

p.1
Dear Mother,
I do not regret the time we never spent.

Dear Father,
I am you and you are me. Who came first? The chicken or the egg?

Dear Self,
You must accept the fact that your imminent death is not and will never be glorious.

p.2
The worst part of realizations,
is they are cruel because
they cannot be changed.

Mine is that I will die

in exactly 17.12 minutes,
(my suit calculates)
whirling between
green, blue, black
speckled with
pinpricks of distant
light from a
different age.

I do not scream.
I do not cry.
I accept.
I am streaking
through time and
atmosphere is
so close, filling my polycarbonate
visor with wisps of white.

I am glad that the last
thing I will see before
I asphyxiate is the
Pacific ocean. I wonder
if fish look up
and wonder what it
is like to breathe.

p.3
I do not envy anything.
I am here, staring at my
entire life defined to
four numbers ticking!

(I have moved past
all things in life. I have
moved past staring at
twin tombstones and
I shall move even when
my synapses shall not,
forever freefalling into
nothing.)

the third thought
that cartwheels across
me squealing heavenly
mercy cries⸺
who will remember you?

The birds twittering under the shingles
of my roof, the squirrels eating the acorns
left on my porch, my posters hanging in
my room are all bits of my
existence and remember me in of
themselves.

I am real; my pain is proof of this.

p.4
00.10
there
00.09
is
00.08
nothing
00.07
more
00.06
beautiful
00.05
than
00.04
earth.
00.03
I
00.02
am
00.01
happy.

Has anyone told you
How long you’ve been away?
There’s a bounty on you;
Ten thousand for the shattered cage
Of your yellowing remnants
Since the fireworks and fireweed
And forest fires of midsummer
Maybe all three joined mouths
To swallow you whole
Your sinkhole eyes slow-dripped dread
On my mother, poised on the hammer
Of a cautious gun
Now they surely pour instead
The writhing, creeping vicars
That hold the slow vigil
For every dark blooded thing
That lie contorted
In hasty gravel graves
They have carried you to an afterworld
And you live on beneath the laminate
Flapping slowly
Against the obligated storefronts

The sky looks like a pearl
scraped from the oyster,
unwilling shells pried
apart
by the man’s callused hands.
A man who asks himself,
Why do all the sad things
happen only to poets?
And a man who believes it
despite the oyster’s split spine,
clawed curves.
One who would note
two fewer eagle nests this year,
one who could make a meal
out of a homegrown tomato slice.

It feels like pissing in a clean bathtub—
relief that could kill him. A
mustard gas spatter.
Like trying to suture it all back
together after sawing clean through,
the layers of fabric and padding and springs,
too yielding beneath the rev.
Gnawing against stitches sewn
by thimbled fingers on frosty Sundays
while he watched America’s team.

He leaves things lesser than he found them,
just in more pieces—
like a cloud breaking apart to let the sun in,
or a baby bird shattering the egg with its beak.
All of what nature intended,
all of what he scrapes up
during his riverbed rounds, knowing
that the deeper he goes,
the tougher the earth will be.

And he tells himself
that if he were a musician,
he’d never want to fly again.

I didn’t think about it much then
But I do now understand

The precision with which my
Grandmother could skin

Apples and potatoes
Such serene cool about her face

Not a line in the skin reminiscent
Of a frown, nothing in the eyes

Twinkled a smile
Her tiny fingers never slipped

Steady in their journey
Never wasting apple or potato

Only skinning what was necessary
When I’m fumbling a knife around

An apple staring out into my backyard
(My lack of rigor reminds me that

My hardships are nothing to hers)
I do think about

Our lives as parallel
Or as derailed synonyms

As a little girl I didn’t think about it much
But as a woman, I do now know

What my grandmother was thinking
When she skinned with such precision