Discover Top Posts Tagged with #digital chapbook

Self as Liminal, Endless

I am both wife and partner as I am both obsessed and obsession both me and not-me;

How I am both reflective and reflexive how I straddle and enmesh, brim catatonic after tramadol, roped to a one-bedroom windows overlooking alley, I go without underwear all summer.

I am a cotton blazer and droplet earrings, chelsea boot and braided low pony; I refuse to behave, to look forward to anything, meandering spring fawns, a hydrangea impossible behind one ear, the swell of mediocrity I leave hung by the door.

I write about myself in these distant ways crushed by limitation, a question of desire but don't confuse entitlement with desire: when you are let down by something, don't be startled, write a letter you do not intend to mail, the beaded threads you slip beneath the weight of knowing that we are all dying but I don't concern myself with this, instead just wanting to be cornered, looking like I want to be touched (how does wanting look, except like it should last longer), my dry spell the thing I don't talk about with anyone. My desperation: first of many. Hollow, or hollowed, depending on where you stand; how I ask for opening as treasure panel, hidden limb. I hang my coat by the fire and slip into my nightskin, my mourningown. Doing my best means letting best become endless

#ccny #jre #digital chapbook #poetry workshop

Larry D Rosalez-Lewis shared a post on Instagram: "organic somethings digital chapbook: #chameleons (potential to reprint and bind)". Follow

considering ways to press. <sarcasm>look out nah👀

some kind of hard bind, $27 after press . #estimates

#chameleons #anexcerptofhim #chapbook #digital chapbook #anjali mudra #photography

humble brag

I’ve been the lover of clouds; even rode my own blue zephyr.

Scryed with sunlight and didn’t go blind. Had a one-night stand with each

of the seven seas. Whispered with a unicorn under a strawberry moon.

Learned to weather work from an old book, whipping up dirt into a stinging

cocktail no one had ordered but the toads. Been a constellation of

carbs on the asphalt. Food for birds and others.

Sweet blooded, I make an excellent meal.

Wear my bites like summer badges.

Grew my hair into a rope and escaped the bedroom window

without any help. Traveled into the subcortical zones of the brain,

then painted the deep and ancient structure

from memory on my hands with water color.

Provided a good place for a small animal to die,

clover soft, with little black feet wrapped carefully in a

recycled fancy napkin. Named him Leo.

Buried him in sacred compost. No need to check the pH.

Taught my tears to flow superiorly, back up their iridescent tracks. I

am mostly water; I need every drop.

#original poetry #second draft #digital chapbook

Primer for Monogamy

That I could use my life as evidence of love, that my examinations of self and subjectivity would end as more than cursory, as though I could find out by becoming the self I theorize; that my girlfriend and my boyfriend both belong in my writing, in my home, in my planning;

divorce/e looms large and hungry, a periphery for what my loves can look like over time, a primer for monogamy; every few months, I tumble into a new love: air signs and their embracement of fluidity; arrogant blond/es; femmes with too many jobs;

I can't remember not being in love,

the smell of new skins, the kind we forget and never are able to let go, how forgiveness is never just an afternoon, but a lifetime; I am petty beyond belief, like, you would never expect me to let you go but I do, loose my hands from the hot hook of your elbow under heat lightning exploding in the clouds above, thick night, towels damp bunched in backseat.

Let me go and learn to love, I hear but you deny begging, you deny waiting for hours outside my long flat house, wrestling my pit mix into holly bush, leaning into it, an abrupt and catastrophic kiss, then another.

When I microdose, I flit to every candle in my house and drape necklaces across full moon window smoking aloft, the gaunt promise of kinship caught. It's not over but I hope for the best while you jerk off next to me, one hand down my unbuttoned black jeans, me smoking out the window.

Later, I learn that this, for you, is love;

I am still learning what it is for me: forgiveness of my tortured body, slow breathing on cool floor, melon on the fire escape.

I eat for years, dream of a universal fatness, a belly beyond my own, a chubby cherubic world who can walk all evening, down past Houston, angling east towards the river. New York is not mine, but I am not into possessive love anyway; my girlfriend and her new boyfriend come over for wine and dinner.

Call me another orphan, a loose calendrical. On some level, Artaud is just a minor, bad on purpose, something I can flaunt:

(I'm just too much for you);

I can break away all by myself, for those of you who paused to let me finish, to allow me: in need of no allowance, instead, a taker: one who takes without shame, finishes whether or not you've freed yourself from the dim jungle of your body, mine is evergreen, trading breath with galactic earnestness, glitter carved into my trunk, graffiti from the liberated bodiless horde, a queer crowd spirited above.

When I forget to invite you, it isn't, when I hold you before

#ccny #poetry workshop #jre #DIGITAL CHAPBOOK

Life Signs

after Star Trek: Voyager S02E19

Before you, I was just a mass of photons held together by a force field: 11 compound fractures, 3 appendectomies, 2,128 medical textbooks. Several clinical studies have shown humor to be therapeutic; consider it part of your treatment. Call me [______], but what should I call you? I know you don't have a name; would it be alright if I gave you one? Good thing we're both holograms; if you think it's best, make me laugh, take me to the place with holo-emitters, where we can almost touch. Holograms don't get crushes, I've been told. What is this rush of light particles, this portable emitter that projects my skin, the static where our hands meet. I am experiencing periodic lapses in cognitive concentration, so even though I'm adaptive, I'm used to being empty. I'm used to being in control of my faculties, but lately I find myself thinking of nothing but you. I feel unsettled; hypothetically, I want to pursue closeness. Hypothetically, I'll never know anything if you remain deactivated.

#jre #ccny #poetry workshop #digital chapbook

Cyclobenzaprine

I show up for alleviation, but we sit with tenderness instead.

Not long from now, you will be a blessing again

Jay Deshpande

We have been at least two people:

I oscillate between deserving beauty and excoriating it, purging sleeplessness;

Even then, I was hungry beyond logic, desperate to lean into your bloom of mouth, your body imaginary under your coat, opaque gulf of wool and acrylic, I longed to shred like an animal;

Don’t lose your longing: this is what makes you a fern unspooling in a desert.

A savage lesson in letting go: letting you abject on the sidewalk, your body unbroken, you don’t need my spine, your smoky panels marking the beginning of forgiving yourself.

#jre #poetry workshop #digital chapbook #ccny

Patron Saint of Lost Causes

after Grey’s Anatomy S01E08

I start a new strain of antibiotics, spend every night you're out of town in bed fluffed with heating pads, my family thinking I'm certifiable, correlating seizures with visions, chicken with forgiveness.

Humor me with your psychic energies: frame me amethyst, gold-plated, clove oil smearing ash across my buckwheat pillow

I can text from here; slurp white wine and crackers because if the fever goes away what else can I do I can't eat soup for every meal

If I wake up predicting dead edge, windowsill lined with diamond shelf, hanging oracle, hardly knowing anything about you; I'm an intellectual; I don't have friends; I tell my therapist that I cut people off because I don't have time for them but I feel so lonely anyway and that doesn't make any sense, fluttery surge of starting a new SNRI, a sliver of mania, how when I hobble into a room everyone stops talking and it's not to revel in my dope outfit;

Sick in solidarity, my friends say on Instagram; cripple-femme, steam-nap, quitting the tumor, remembering that all my visions are proof of my profundity, the clarity I can etc closer and closer to my spine, a looseness of growing up, shopping for a bikini I may or may not ever wear, always an alternative to yesterday, what I would become if you saw me as the miracle I am, literally I want my life back, a bottle of French white, a good probability of survival, which piece of you resists this promise of survival?

Do you feel anything over here? How about here? Trust your instincts: bend my spine the way you would bend anything, a dialogic approach, a way to limit your own scope: cutting pages out and shredding them into separate garbage cans, the wow of the practical, the maybe this is how it's supposed to be shrug or nod, or passive body gesture, proceeding towards the tangle of blood vessels that align with Saturn, showing off my insecurities, my nicknames

A quick pelvic exam; a reminder that the damage is permanent. Stall until the walls close in: stack your walls with living things, the stuff untreatable; one of many problems without a solution, cut into me and look for something pulsating, something to fix;

My EMG: normal, quiet, pinching and backless, uncomfortable; I am seeking an emotional logic but through all the wrong turns, the gulf between my intellect and my gut. Simply, I am a girl with a dark side

#jre #poetry workshop #digital chapbook #ccny

Calcification

after Planet Earth

Limestone wriggling alive; my entire life within

the cave, remains of bats’ unguzzled luncheon;

my eyes burst ballooning, purge fluttering wings.

I'm seeing lots of spitting up here, can you remind me

to turn that sound off, to remember to remember

that I said that; I untangle spoils of yarn, colonies

flourishing; spit eats away at my bones wave for

splatter; it moves against calcite, stalagmiting

in my bedroom, tousled magazines and slow