This Night Has Opened Her Eyes
Posted by Lauren Yates | Filed under Poetry, Print
“She could have been a poet or she could have been a fool,”
she sings to herself, quite aware that she’s both. It’s as natural to her as the runs
in her stockings. There’s no need to varnish the inevitable. She piles
her hair atop her head into acceptable disaster, choosing to ignore the black roots
growing from her scalp. She had dyed her hair burgundy. But it’s not as if anyone believed
it was natural, so she really has nothing to lose. She pulls on her geisha
T-shirt. The one where she leans over the turntables, arms covered in tattoos. The geisha,
that is, not the girl. Though she does want sleeve tattoos someday, the day she fools
herself into thinking she’s willing to spend that much money. I can’t believe
people pay to go through that much pain, she ponders. Random thoughts run through
her head of justice and her drama teacher’s kid sister. She wore overalls and had black roots
too, come to think of it. But she’s probably married now, dreams on hold, sorting through piles
of laundry. Maybe she thinks back to past relationships that didn’t involve compromise or piles
of clothes to hand-wash. Maybe she’ll find lipstick on her husband’s collar, deep red like a geisha’s.
Everything jerks. Our girl barely remembers how she got on this train or scrolled to The Roots
on her iPod. It’s full, both of songs and the cough syrup she knocked over on her nightstand. Foolish
of her not to stand it up once she noticed the bottle had fallen. But the iPod still works, and she runs
through songs on shuffle. Some remind her of him, none remind her of her, and it’s unbelievable
how many songs have swearing. In high school, she wrote a “This I Believe” essay
supporting edited music. Why pay more to buy something the way it’s marketed to you? People pile
onto the train and a woman steps into a puddle of spilled coffee. It runs
across the floor beneath the seats, milky, but no one’s crying. A man eyes the geisha
on her shirt, or rather, her breasts. The girl’s, that is. She folds her arms, wondering how this fool
thinks he can ogle her so shamelessly. He averts his eyes to the map of the train’s routes
mounted on the wall. Strange people take public transportation. Like the woman quoting Roots
who says she knows her Malcolm X, her eyes desperate with doubt, like she can’t believe
in sound advice because it goes against her principles. Like the boy who thought our girl had fooled
him. It was in Biology class. And she’d told him lobsters scream as they die before diners pile
butter sauce onto their tender flesh. He’d thought it was a lie and refused to fall for such a “gay”
lie. Words like “blatant” and “outright” are above his reading level. He writes in run-on
sentences and is the type to leave his windows up if in a car during a tornado. So she just ran with
it, too exhausted to protest and too naïve to be offended. Because she prefers root canals
to confrontation and prefers ideas to people, but she loves aesthetics the most and wants the geisha
to really exist. Whether she wants to look like her or be with her she’s not sure. But she believes
she’ll one day meet the person who’ll make her trust in love. She bumps into a stranger as she piles
off the train two stops too late. This is the third time this week. She doesn’t know who she’s fooling:
she’ll never be served runny eggs and turkey bacon in bed by a hip-hop loving geisha,
her foolish heart will never find the one—it will settle for the time being, only to grow like roots
firmly anchored into soil, and she’ll compile a list of ways to happy, but won’t believe enough to try.
Wreckage
Posted by Melissa Pavri | Filed under Poetry, Print
The nearness of you is marble on sky. Enchanting and breakable. I do not know how to sleep without the obsidian clouds that travel your gaze. They look like a mouth of dream that likes to mull over the ocean. Big fish and little noise. Everything that washes over our bellies in the youngest hours of the afternoon. You listen. Like the conch of my lips can tell you the all the answers and the sand will not write them down. We drift for the damnation of not knowing when the world will end. What its silkscreen will look like against the wall of morning. You know that waves are fickle and only the shore will care about you when the sun wakes up. But we both like moments. How they surf the crests of our noses like a breath in a flame. Sometimes you are a compass on the tip of blast and I want to be your Magellan. Follow you into the storm of your self and remind you of the peace beneath the city. I want to tell you our season is graying. The trees are bending their spines to tell us we are flightless birds we do not know our feathers. I might live a dozen lifetimes in the wristwatch of this week. The face of time will silver and laugh no more. I might get another tattoo and you might cut your hair. I hate the way I need to wake to you how innocent its bones look at dusk. I will unfeel the summer in your skin and tell the sun to know the nape of your neck like I did. My poems will not wait for me. Reason will be a wrecking ball of fist and we will be the falling house no one cares to fight for. You know there is no axiom for the way it happens. How unsettling it is to fall in fear with a moment that is seven leagues away. But you cannot know it until it comes said the silence. Its skeleton will crumble between your fingers and you will wonder how flesh wanders. Like a mind on mushrooms. It is unthinkable. Though I suppose we are too. I can map our voyages but I cannot imagine the distance. Cannot measure its ache in thought. Will it unfold by the fathom one night in July and paddle through a few thousand miles to tell its story to a sea of strangers. Will it thrash like a beached dolphin or sit on a bed of memory. I will have to wish on the wreckage.
Fragments
Posted by Lauren Yates | Filed under Poetry, Print
I.
Nighttime.
Less like
time for sleeping.
I think better in
darkness.
II.
Collage.
Claimed, spliced.
Cutting, placing, pasting.
Cover the blank spaces.
Self.
III.
Hello.
We fake wide smiles
effortlessly. Sore cheeks.
This isn’t going anywhere.
Goodbye.
The Quick – a haiku
Posted by Alysia Harris | Filed under Poetry, Print
My flesh knew a laugh
once. (1) Shake. (2) Serve… for old time’s sake.
It’s a piece of junk.
