The poems are both still available on the magazine’s website.
“Manifest” was writen specifically for my book Balsamblood.
I’ve written this book over the last few years reflecting on my connection to & memories of my hometown as I shift my focus toward moving again. The manuscript includes collages made with photos I took in the scrub-steppe wilderness around the valley.
Manifest
“The last supper at a strip club” was written off the cuff after seeing a funny DALL-E image set on Twitter.
I was goofing around when I wrote it, but when I read it back it’s a dance between existential anxiety & the darker, stranger parts of my avoidant personality — the crux being the twin fears of being seen & not being seen.
& yeah, it’s blasphemous in ways that would absolutely terrorize the elders in my devoutly religious family but that point for me is in that shock, that grief, that shame. It’s a tiny fragment of how it feels to be shattered & compartmentalized by a religious system that has almost entirely divorced itself from the belief it lays claim to. Or at least I tried, but I was mostly being an idiot.
The last supper at a strip club
Do you even know how my body
should look? Pink as the inside
of a conch shell & legs like the lobes
of my lungs. Let me be, let me be
seen, let me be seen wholly, holy. Let me
become myself in the act of being seen.
The universe sways its hips & a star is born,
God sure is a horny motherfucker
but I digress, I lean unto thou & thou sayest
time is a bloated tick on the back of His hand
& it is the digestion of time which makes flesh.
Time becomes shit, becomes inches of skin
corrupted by a summer afternoon when I was
nine, I ate three otter pops & fell asleep
on the lawn. Pink & blue & green – the imprint
of grass on my back hatched with lines
rendered from the movement of the cosmos; my body
inside this masterpiece, the elongated
berth of my sins caught in the distortion of the living.
My Lord, are the things that matter made lighter
in the presence of sin? Shorter goodbyes,
shattered fingers, an uneasy sense that I am not
actually living this life. Oh God, I am a blur,
I am a whisper, I am a flutter of the tablecloth
within & without, in your eyes & my own, & I dance
this table, haunt this painting. Legs like the outreaching
tendrils of a dying star. We see each other
across the table & for a brief moment, we exist.