Two Poems (Eulogy & These Smart Glasses ...)
Jonas I. Tijerino
How grand it would be if Jedi Temples were Papaya Monuments.
How grand it would be if Jedi Temples were Papaya Monuments.
getting a haircut in the year’s first month will cause the death
of an uncle eating fish will bring your family abundance
八 meaning eight sounds the same as 發 meaning wealth
& also hair eight
from
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO X
Prayer is what you do when you don’t know whether your animal will live through the night. Pink like Pepto-Bismol staining a goat’s chin. Everything lives and
Because there’s a god for the water on your skin
when you’ve come from the lake. One for the absence
of flowers in a vase, for every pump and filter organ inside my dog
One god isn’t enough to
Heavy Metal Love Song
Street drafts off the two-tone carpet in my underworld
Air so much wetter than the memory of it sharpness of weather
spoiling for more life
Two buses
There’s an elderly couple camped out in the parking lot of an abandoned Bennigan’s.
Full-sized, luxury RV, Weber grill, folding chairs, red Coleman cooler.
These folks have options, and yet they
10,000 years from now
two men will be
digging
in the ground
and they’ll find
a frisbee
buried deep below the surface.
one man will look it over,
puzzled,
and turn to the other man
and
to gain followers I use my body then / I lose them with my poems
while i / in half-lotus / pluck stubble from / my belly
Rain drags its cage / through the neighborhood. You / see nothing but // trenches. Rusty shovels, / the alien rocks sprayed / like genitals.
For weeks after, I watched California burn / out my window & on the evening news & the ash // in my cheeks became the only way/ to pronounce home.
My dog keeps biting me when he’s scared / and, like anyone, is always scared.
With the bobby pin I’ve kept beneath my tongue all morning, / my fingers spring the lock to my parent’s bedroom // where mom’s cherry lipstick glows beneath a seashell lamp.
New Jersey as land of claws & fangs & deep fields of grass that stumble onto the side of the highway // New Jersey as fields of soft dirty ice // New Jersey as blondhairblueeyes slapping you in the face at lunch in the cafeteria in front of all your friends
Love is like a museum. You have to look around, experience things, and then leave.
"[Her Lesser Work] is a collection of mordant and formally inventive stories circling themes of, let’s say, desire and escape within repressive structures."
-Walker Caplan, Literary Hub