Month: August 2016

[If the future is a fetish]
excerpted from Without Them I Am Still A Mother

If the future is a fetish. If my pussy is a sick fixation. If my pussy can’t be fixed. For like the field
it has no doors. For like a business it has several partners. For like the future I’m a port. If the
future dreams of pussy. If the future is a tentacle emerging from my body. If the future is an
ocean floor. For X is a tentacle pulsing. For J is a tentacle pulsing. If I reproduce as a compulsion.
There is me & there is me & there is me & when my child finally arrives with organs pulsing. If I
have my child then tape up every hole. If my memory is a stranger. If they never leave me for
they do not enter. There is me & there is me & I will reassemble. If not all departures are
abandonments. If my child is healthy she will grow. If I am generous & recognize you thirst for
things I cannot know. I will reassemble. I am branded by no letters. If they leave. I let them.

 

**

 

[The jugular is a substantial vein]
excerpted from Without Them I Am Still A Mother

 

the jugular is a substantial vein I bring I bring a blade

 

I bring death is not a public space death is no one’s

 

private joke I will not condone you celebrating any decomposing body

 

or the recreation of a body like my own when I wake up

 

from a dream & finally I’m queer when I’m never going back to sleep

 

I will not romanticize the hollow of my throat licked

 

by Xanax 2mg like marrow from a bone the jugular engorged with blood

 

the testicles engorged my memory rejects your sperm

 

my jugular rejects the blade I pledge allegiance to tumescence

 

make my life a public space look my recreation

 

a parade I hoist my lovers like balloons reject the possibility of weight

 

**

 

Elegy For My Bush & Other Lushness

i love being thin enough to slice of course you die from the pocketknife slender

bloodline trailing towards the floor my right-now lover is a horse decaying in the center

of the road who runs over a horse who sucks the entrails from his butt leaving him

a tender husk we fall asleep carved-out we eat food that turns our feces green

we are very regular i carve him out of every private dream i kiss a girl he doesn’t know

i wake adorned in piss & can’t remember who i love all my former fucks refuse

to be decrepit they shed their hair inventively they buy silver shoes with no strings

in bed i map out ways to modify my body i’ll wear my bowels as a scarf i’ll wax

the backwoods of my crotch into a strip dewy steak to dig your teeth into

here is where the aesthetician skins my cunt with tiny licks here is where my lover licks

the puckered skin around my cunt a little too far to the right though i don’t touch myself

enough to be a guide if you could please ravage this succulent valley if you could please

suck this ravishing valley i value my rapture the curdled scum the female form

does not supply a fill the female form a bucket in the sand granules delicious wet

my lover’s penis swells inside me like a cheeseburger digesting painfully i vomit

up the shape of a girl he doesn’t know how she tastes in a dark room

i am not the void i own nothing of the void i own nothing i have vomited it up

here our dwindled bodies here my skin recoiling here my puss a neat frontier

 

**

 

YUM

my rapture

mmmm a heath bar shake from Baskin Robbins

is the most

caloric beverage in America

according to Eat This, Not That

eat this: my pussy

on a good day

is still arid

edible matter

the most wholesome things

are not always the most toothsome

there is no such thing as an animal

not transformed

by all of its encounters

find me a body

still intact

YUM Kristeva

mmmm my mother

everyday i eat my unborn child

as a light snack

 

**

 

What I Mean Is Poem But I’m Sleepy

no one loves me so i’ll write a pome

got home drunk & wrote a pome

smoked a cigarette as an accessory

someone put my pome in a gallery

this pome in minor key

my heart a feral peach

this pome a fuzzy caterpillar

maybe just a worm

at the bar you’re sitting

with a handsome man i’ve never met

in the bathroom

i’m asserting how i’m ugly

lipstick on my teeth

lipstick on my dirt pome

no one text my pome

back

my pome thirsty

for a hunk of flesh

when i don’t eat

i want to kiss whoever

sitting next to me

at least i can come home

to write pome

i love myself

with a fresh hand

i taint my fingers

with tobacco as a fast excuse

to stand

my lips belooooooong

in a pome

my ass belooooooong

on your lips

i will violate myself

in every pome

& still be safe

no one sleeps beside me

but my words

i will fuck my pome

as you probably expect

i stay sadder

than i ever were

 

**

SARAH SGRO currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where she serves as Poetry Editor for the Yalobusha Review and co-hosts the Broken English Reading Series. She is from New York and previously worked as an editorial assistant for Guernica. Her poetry appears in Muzzle, TYPO, glitterMOB, Horse Less Review, Deluge, the minnesota review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Word Riot.

below genola

 

drift draft shifting & windows i

breeze coldly empty myself a

thin strip of sand & swallows

lapping high forceful lengthen &

with boots on i empty myself a

strip of late morning with pacing

be a bee box then in a dream a

dozen shivering silverfish

 
 

self portrait with softly obscured

genitals & little birds a bag faced

lamb another face & one on an

ugly pumpkin out in the swamp a

wandering confectioner often

petting a verdigris skyward &

teetering slack jawed thankful for

horse dancers & little soldiers

 
 

a banker chews my rind & faints

in the heat of the meat market

giblets & such the snakes the

sidle up the cleavers & such

music of the cleavers & such like

clusters of keys do suck up the

air & lull the softer types & such to

sheep softly & cheek stroking

 
 

that even what’s more that even

saltier skin which coming from the

salt pit so staring so stripped so

close that at a cork that a torso

fold itself torquing hillward

saber-headed & holy like men in

the tar pit & tacky like cognac

candied pineapple & swords

 
 

dream team of the extremely

elderly make entrance laterally

on dreamy littorals most sweetly

lector dryly windborne lacteal

night for city folk for tremors in

the people place yokes level out

the people place yokes folks who

swim out & peck at one another

 
 

then them tenderly up the ridge

& all in them were i think you

streaming steam seeing someone

drew a duck on a keep my eyes off

a tender hunk of hairy chest

lovelier melons than field behind

the market where i do soak with

feel soak how to you think you

 
**

DUSTY NEU is a poet and translator born and raised in rural California with an MFA from Brown University. He co-translated Alessandro de Francesco’s Remote Vision from the Italian (Punctum Books) and his poetry has appeared in VOLT, Pear Noir!, and 3am. He lives and works in Rhode Island.

RED BULL VITAMIN FUNCTIONAL DRINK W/ A SIDE OF SCRAPER-TOP VIEWS OF
COASTAL CHINA AIR POLLUTION OR A SATELLITE FLOATING IN SPACE,
AUTONOMOUS, ARCHIVING SNAPSHOTS OF A MASS GRAVE OR CHECK YR
MESSAGING CLIENT OFTEN IF THE TRAGEDY IS ONGOING

“Oh, how different the desert looks
when imagined by the well-educated!”
-Freddy’s third essay,
The Genealogy of Morals

epibiont smiles // white as hellscapes

grab yr damp shirt discrete
or just continuous
or just both
like a circuit

asynchronous speeds slow roll
& chosen collapse like
lets cuddle and share disjunctures

i fuck up again ducking a glare
off geography’s spectral effect on various racial lucencies spiral out n down to just
getting a hand job from a twunk whose shoes
match his lambo stitching

 

my sweat is sugar sweet @ && a hot dawn, dilute a few doses of clarity tongue a gloriously decadent focaline dance

adderall tomorrow’s parties promise vyvantage point pretty w/ abandon chemical trick late into the night

 
 
i like to close my eyes with just an ugly light on
alone in the bedroom
well-acquainted w/ my own darkness
comfortable trusting few things beyond crashes
beyond intimate constant returns

 

***

 

GIVEN EARLY A TASTE FOR THE HYPERCONCIOUSNESS
OF TAROT I MUST ADMIT THAT FOR THE MOST PART THE ASTROLOGICAL TURN
HAS PASSED ME BY I SEE MY FRIENDS AND LOVERS IN THE MOON NOT MY
FUTURE

s
u
n
r
i
s
e

a l l a u d i e n c e s a r e p o s s i b l e

 
One of the seductive things about surveillance is that you know you are making an impression —as so much data —regardless of whatever effort you make or don’t make. You don’t have to try; algorithms will impute intentionality to your behavior without your having to taint it with your own willfulness. The behavior can seemingly remain pure

making an impression, realize you just summarized most of McLuhan’s career
w/ two big ass boogies in yr mustache
to someone who at no point cared about the content of the exchange
just the fact of its existing
stop misreading the crowd
willful taint in summertime sweatpants mid­-noon sandwich kissesdrooling the
sweatshop sublime

an old flame and a flicker shadow of conversations you remember enjoying
all life is conversation // if you expand the definition // generous information generation
a little transformation // an elevator pitch for the glitching globalization of visual language

you know

just one of those seductive things

 
choke me width w/ the seats down inside this suv
cum in the world killer cuddle the nonchild
cum on the world maker cuddle the oncechild

she says stop misgendering me // to someone else // inside their phone
comb his hair really nice say no anal just sit in my lap
behavior can seemingly remain pure behavior can seemingly remain pure behavior can seem
pure behavior can seemingly remain behavior behavior can seemingly remain can behavior
remain remain remain

pure
pure
pure

 
pure
pure
pure
pure
 
illegally parked on a farm

 
***

JUNIOR DARE is a crip abolitionist poet dreaming of the post-queer, studying the left of the future and the right of the present, tweeting @prismxp.