Reba Fay


Buried There:

A bee mutating the lime green front porch’s safe space
The bee is “liminality”
The bee is gilded clit, a pun on snatch/snitch,
Free from the constraints of animal and/or woman
It is easy to name yourself, hard to tell others
Let my name be this sting cleaving red, puckered fat
Or name be the loose black hairs I gag from my shoulders w/ tweezers
Tell my name I want to be totally plastic, flat like boy or bitmap,
Real name a sinewave coiled like an ingrown hair beneath my fake name
Name boring geology of the latex bodysuit I groped with surprise
At the sex shop in LA where I basically died
Though all the tour guides were right: palms & pussy-smell & dying
There’s dying everywhere, what did I expect?
World take this labial deadname, this Motorola buzz in the grave
Or chime abscessing the flat plane, a hole for C sharp and the boy me
Buried there so no one can smell him

**

Prove It:

I keep my muse slender
Excuse me
There she is now
Spelunking an Oreo
For white is a damning color
The color of fat
For if I had a vacuum hot enough
For if I had a third hand
There are so many things I am afraid to touch
Distressed “woman”
Garish calorie
The world balking at the edge of it
You darn your pointe shoes alone
The other girls buzz together
As one as many
Miss Jenny comes to teach you
How to do it the right way
With her hair and obese body
Though when you say you are sick
She will not believe you
Prove it

**

“O Interior, my wounds are your wounds” – Nathan Hoks

I who want to be 14 years old and small

I who am water freezing & melting endlessly

Me with my aura: thyroid w/ a hint of mimosa

I with my fat-stuffed dovecote

Which hides everything living

Though I have faith in the pastoral

Though I have faith in gender entirely

The phist a fruit bruised with logic

Which like light touches everything

Except Ben who is either

A seam or an epigraph

Before the list of nutrition facts

On a bottle of Muscle Milk left curdling

In the sun for days like a billboard

Or someone else’s old Myspace page

Which could be yours or couldn’t


**


REBA FAY is a poet-composer from Washington D.C. A graduate of the University of Virginia, she is an MFA student in Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who performs music and text under the moniker Swan Meat. Recent full-length publications include Welcome (Gauss PDF, 2016).

Matt Broaddus

Production

The room grows crowded. Inside, Fernando Pessoa is making himself. Versions of Fernando spill drinks, laugh and rage at each other. Some pick up grass and eat it, uninterested in speaking with their creator, who is busy making more of himself anyway. From their gazebos, aristocratic Fernandos watch their Fernando sheep. In the hills, shepherd Fernandos tend the sheep under the long eyes of their employers. Fernandos go into town to buy stamps from Fernandos at the post office. They send letters to distant Fernandos, which are delivered by Fernando mailmen. Reality creation continues on schedule. The neighborhood expands.

 

**

 

Dream Information

Maybe the door opens. Maybe I enter, cautious as always, tiptoeing like I’m sneaking through my long lost neighbor’s kitchen. The forest greets me, maybe full of tree­like boughs windswept in an airless chamber. Maybe knowing is some kind of violence I cause the forest, the paths cutting through, the swell of creatures I’ve never seen who speak like flutes. Tinged with indigo light in what I know to be a room without illumination, a room that is not a room holds me and all this life in a forest where I smell what I guess is not ­quite sage. Maybe I follow the smell to a foreign coastline, a foreign ocean. Maybe none of it’s foreign, I’ve just forgotten. Maybe I can speak the language of that moment. Alone on the horizon, among the waves, maybe a lighthouse holds up the sky.

 

**

 
So I’ve decided to become a mentat

The sound is too big.

In the heat of the crowd,

mass of musical darkness,

individual faces detach

from their bodies, the room,

this planet, this plane.

Chaos is its own sign.

The nocturnal city,

a silver wave

punctuated by red lights, by blue,

spins around my body,

arrayed among data points.

People swaying on the floor­­—

I am one of them.

I live in time

so I dance.

You hand me a drink.

I remain alive.

 

**

MATT BROADDUS is a Cave Canem fellow whose poems have appeared in Small Po[r]tions, LEVELER, and The Offing. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.