How old give me that old feeling
say together
an angry lover of words rots at
the sentence says everybody talks about their
time in the garden
names like Forsythia I hear
and then i hear little mouths say
for a living!
for my special puce olives in their brine
we’re born with an eye color
most of my friends have more than one eye
more than two colored eyes!
I have beautiful taste in the soul
yet this negator did not do it for me
so these days i spend a great deal of time
hazily removing myself
from public databases
so as not to be found
Vile and the viler the better
the extra mess up
your insurance has to make the calm call about
Then you call them back too and begin a relationship with your insurance
small dot on my face have not seen myself in at least as long as the floorboard
reap made of reeds
something else entirely
substitute teachers show up at the door
Locked
I will take my life, I said
And with a suddenness, dinner was paid for
No one knew
The run-off was boilable
A clear, direct thought in having how I would like to end up very very much unafraid of a person
and instead
only the figments that whisk around
causing a confidence leading to snoozing
on the part of whatever’s supernatural
which happens when a feeling conjures at all
The gorgeous chunk of a number
She’s a seven he’s a three
And in their minds a nine, a niner
we squeak for this opportunity to leave the earthly slat
More odor–
I only date nines and tens
it is time to amend myself
the end of writing does not end with me
what a dizzying misunderstanding being a young person has been
everyone clapping for more when the situation calls for it
Of course
And to transition into a new understatement
The only overstatement my unending sexual resumé
you deem me what
you deem me And i shut up
Congratulations winner
Live for that clip again
Live for the reality from then
you too down
I will openly explain each step
an instinct from long ago
but the curtains she said reminded her of eggs
I imagined the edges to nibble at
the crinoline edge
this will be a book about eggs
epically tall
too expensive
to get each word
down how it would be imagined
the licking behind the wind
Wands, vibrators
mickey mouse, the conductor
Fantasia of remembering rape
led up the one turning
Badges and the pageantry of fobs
the low-wrung half-pint
only the Prairie is
i’m thirty
And it no longer can be salvaged
That the programming drove me to my murder
Others’ fantasies about a gridless walden
The Salaciousnesses of a banister
like a cabin to hang on to
Utopia of everyone promising me shelter
or to sort preferred colors of m&m
make room for fuschia correlations; you have hated me into a coma
I am a whore for knowing you
Who stops now?
i disengaged so i’m not so sure what i see
it’s true what people say when they feel terrible
that’s always true
couldn’t we give them that?
I never said it wasn’t the case
I said i’m in pain
The hurt doesn’t have anything
besides its tone
an oboe
no one needs to engage this space
searching for a recipient
you subscribed me to something i don’t trash
pages in my house
no fireplace
you go to kindling
Force a house on me
photograph who looks like me in a way
searching all day through data to hunt for a likeness
My business corrugated and sexual
in its crunchy, resistant argument against air
I can slide down rocks in fluids in rhode island
The escape attempt down into nature
The world is always dying or working toward picking
whether to starve working people
unless they sneak some.
the automatic bloom of an unsatisfactory tea flower
a caffeine wash
for old-ass skin
the skin- a layer onto a computer to protect myself
To think of what a stem could do if
the thought broke
all of the legging flopping at the butt
small, vaginal holes
And I can’t be celebrated for that decision
one must take on other causes
the high-mindedness of the lack of contribution
To the suffering when you can remember how
being completely honest
You have no idea how to solve even small
Bits of burrito falling, tumbling
i could offer
onto the carpet at work
Never use you in writing
Use it but the iconoclast who uses it and makes it cool again
The maximum i have reached is unimportant
When others-it’s true-
remain more capable but don’t have the know how
But would if you explained it once for fifty-three seconds
World overall different let it turn another way
To save us from conventions
Their gaggy pacing
The email chain of expressivity no one liked receiving
My neighbor and his sexist emails in jokes
My neighbor and his racist jokes in emails
To leave your body with another body part in it
Return to a rapist after being raped in an innovative manner
And somehow it becomes oversimplified
The divine experience imparting a lack of entitlement
Some rapist denouncing the skeptical assessment of calling it rape
Because it is not taking place in a classical painting?
Would you scream to get away?
In your parents’ house? No-
In my mother’s house from fear i’d get in trouble?
No
And the chaos of that moment
The living of your lack
of value I set my hands on my lap now
I’m not here to argue with you
The world is over
And we can’t misunderstand another thing
The epic, i fear
On the luxury of miscommunication
I am everything you say i am
If it stops you from hurting
If it stops me from fixing anything
Frozen peas selected one at a time
For paranoid reasons
To eat individually
a particular pang
**
ELIZABETH MIKESCH is the author of Niceties: Aural Ardor, Pardon Me (Calamari Archive). She wrote a minivan opera for Clarice Lispector and held a residency connected to The Bottom at Mass MoCA in 2017. You can find her work in Unsaid, Bomb, The Rupture, Black Warrior Review, Dreginald, Juked, Sleepingfish, and Puerto Del Sol. Her story “The Largesse” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024. Her book, Sobriquet or, The Assalant Uses an Aliad, will come out via Keith LLC.
