Suggestion / Fight
Mikaela Grantham
Suggestion
new boyfriend says he’s worried. new boyfriend says i should stop saying credit cards are just free money. new boyfriend says i should stop telling strangers at the bar lyme disease
Suggestion
new boyfriend says he’s worried. new boyfriend says i should stop saying credit cards are just free money. new boyfriend says i should stop telling strangers at the bar lyme disease
reach inside the incision
up the stomach from the asshole
ribcage gristle light brown mound of heather memory
spill oddities, like miraculous whole red berries
feel for the heart with two
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
~ W.B Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’
One day, your borders shall speak;
Indignant birds will shit on your
Under the cruel glow of inquiry, I want to tell her that the party is over.
Hurry, tomorrow’s ashen face is at your door.
Hold out your hands, two tiny suns,
you’re more golden than they ever told you.
You’re from the cornfields, I tease, but not really. Your parents, professors at U of Illinois, both versed in the theories of music, both of them concert pianists. They play hushed, reverent duets
I grew up in grass but here / everything is bladeless, // hair thinned past feathers, / sheets slick enough to grease a boar.
Most nights we stayed behind, Tweety Bird / pajama shirts stretched over our knees, waist-length hair soaking / our backs as we sat on the floor and thumbed glossy 10mm prints.
my parents taught me to say ‘surrender’
in a dozen foreign languages.
Subtraction, division,
rabbit bones, rabbit lives
sometimes i wake up in empty fields, waiting for the aliens to take me. they haven’t yet, but any day now, i’m sure.
And somehow I’m supposed to get dressed in the morning / when most days arrive like a gold chain tangled in black chest hair.
You will etch your name in the most lunar dust. This world / may be large enough for none of us, saddest darling.
It’s simple, really. / You, like the other yous / are gone, returned to the God of metals.
After being hospitalized in 1968 / for an aortic aneurysm, Rothko’s doctor / prescribed that he only paint and draw / on mediums less than three feet tall.
And what is essential for me to believe is that / the plants themselves were changed by Joan, / that bathing with her in the light and fragrance
spirits in the trees / hush love hush love / go’on fly home
Is this new relationship self-sabotage in disguise, or is it the cure?
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