Self-guided tour: Exhibit #9 from the National Museum of Broken Marriages

A medium says to channel the late wife through beloved objects. I press my ear to a mug, a journal, my husband’s chest.

Whatever: molecules transform / and become part of my arms, my legs—that’s cool.

Glass of Water—

Selves rasp against each other. Mother's little bucket of wisdom tipped over; teacher's sweet girl has curdled. Mere glimpse of the calm hand of an honest femme could heal—cool

They

whoever they are they warn freak snowstorms
in spring & weak apple harvests & everyone mutters
certain doom in small talk & watches the news cycle
for the deaths of their

In these poems I am using ‘Chelsea Martin’ as a pseudonym for someone who is not Chelsea Martin.

I've been socialized to be alive / the quiet death of women eating salad

i have stopped worrying / about being / a robot / version of me / with unfamiliar eyes / but i have other worries

We lie here together, gold in charred hands, / pulling the ash from each other’s hair.

This is the most difficult sermon, / The one where the disciples / Burn the hamburger buns and / Christ nearly misses his train.

I grow our loneliness in my mouth, feed you— / sweet and bleak— under a halo of buzzing stars.

The snow is beautiful and I want to die. Who could / refuse this softness?

Than the plastic donation kiosks in a mall / shaped like a funnel. You walk up and roll / your change and watch all of it spiral down

I am all the way turned on; turned up. Nerve-hiss-skin. There is a story here, and I am running interference.

It isn't natural / for a thin stem with fruits / to sprout up – / they're heavy, / they're supposed to just hang.

I dream myself into a field that is lime green. There is a branch in my lungs, and I can’t love like I used to. This is a ghost story.

The Gemini

It would be a lie to say I always went to bed with one brother
and woke up with another—that at night he placed pomegranate
 
seeds on my belly, making constellations on my

I sip red wine and weed / and deface anything that looks like me

montreal

in the seventh month of winter
my hair was orange, an apricot
graffiti zig-zagged along broken
threads you parked on atwater
avenue and screamed at your
hooves, rubber hands

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

I finally tore Bluets in half @ 12:50 a.m.
I had had enough of it, of its blueness…
I had begun to loathe its preciousness, its precision
What it represents -
Its fans, the copycats

Chicken à la King

I bit. We bred a snoutless dog to lead
us to the prize. We groomed ourselves
with yearning floss. You swam
through scum in the retention pond
and called it flamenco.

now the poem is a woman

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.