Poetry Roundup #3
vents - long and self-indulgent. not much craft here. trigger warnings for themes of domestic violence in the last poem.
after the fallout
after the fallout i will
zip up my hazmat suit,
retrieve my Geiger counter and
not delete you from my pinned messages
for two years.
after the fallout i will descend into the earth and
count my favorite bullets, one by one
i’ll carry seventeen, just for you —
you and your numbers and your ABBA playlists,
above ground where the sun touches down there are
no more flowers in May.
after the fallout i will venture
out into the wasteland and visit
your grave each day
looking for signs that you’ve been digging
up.
the dirt’s always the same —
undisturbed.
vacuum
staring down the barrel of
some imagined greatness
you can tell me to pray,
but this was here first:
i was born early.
hungry.
jumping the gun, and
like always
you look right through me
fleeting, averse, fourteen
touch me on the shoulder
white-hot
the ghost of your hand lingers
long after you’re gone
ten years down the drain and i’m
still a knife, serrated and rusted out
cleaving through this life like
a demolition ball
heavy, seething, coated.
lose-lose
all sticks and weeds, i am
deleting our playlists, i am
dying in the reeds, i am
boiling alive in this terrible dream
waiting to wake up
waiting to not hate you
you, you, you —
putting me on hold, baby
for the rest of my life
punished, always —
forever and a day.
guts
need’s claws curl right into me,
coring out the soft bits,
the places you’ll never touch:
California soil, dry and sandy
tearing through Lake Tahoe,
screaming along with Rutherford:
“Who am I gonna call?
Who’s gonna catch me when I…”
plates shattered across kitchen floors,
meaty hands around my throat,
purple coating the backs of my thighs,
half-broken little toes that got
in the way.
old dogs won’t learn and i’m back here again,
in the lands of myself where
gentleness does not exist and will not exist
for a while.
the winds hum long and low
across darkened fields inside me,
my shadow melts across your back.
(light is a fleeting gift, truly — some of us must
crush it, lest we go blind.)
Damn ❤️🔥