Poetry Featured in PJO
Featured
no matter why
or if, or in what way, what
I want to say is
“is wrong is a guy thing is a radical notion in the Czech Republic is the future”
“An acerbic alchemy of PBR and hormones
bubble up inside my mouth,
crammed in a theater showing My Bloody Valentine.
Drizzled spit and splatter campfire, bad decisions”
“His pigment box rattled. / His brushes bristled / in the morning sun. / Rain had come & gone.”
Are your friends writers as well? (is poetry all you talk about?) / Define friendship (my IG friends are closer to me than God)
“My grandma calls it / your bloom. Once I saw a used pad / on the bathroom floor, and the stain / did kind of look like a flower.
“I am reminded one morning in montparnasse cemetery / searching for markers in the fog with my new family”
“…you think about how the prettiest girl in your Catholic middle school / compared the bodies of girls who touched the bodies of boys to the body of Bathsheba.”
“ Like the sun, God / follows him home. Like the moon, he never marries. Chooses to adopt. / His father calls with bad news. The phone a brick in his hand.”
“worms inch
his nostrils and build
homes eggs hatch behind
glass eyes mother tells
me to pull the meat
off the bones it’ll
freeze well i puke”
“one line or two from poem. / use space slash space to indicate line breaks
“Since you’ve gone, I’ve watched rerun clips / of SNL, Norm McDonald as Burt Reynolds on Jeopardy, /young Will Ferrell bland as Trebek—I laughed, maybe”
“Close ups of the court, / our sneakers against the asphalt, / your fingertips stagnant.”
“We are sharing the big bathtub / of life, tan toes and blonde hair / snaking down the drain, pulling / at the pipework.”
“I’ll whisper the end of the love story I started / in 1993 and you can tell me about heaven”
“After watching Black Panther 2 / the man next to me sobs / each inhale heavy”
“ He showed me how to eat a tamarind pod. I told him I’d been drying seeds in the pandemic and asked if tamarind could grow up here. “I don’t know,” he said, “but if they can, it’ll take a couple of years.”
“If you’ve got the cash and can learn to squint your eyes just right, God can be as pink as cotton candy. Hell, God can even bend into a metonym for TV dinners.”
“Can you deny my free will? Can you banish my shadows / silence my echoes, make the person in the mirror disappear”
“At dusk, orphans flock to the abandoned chapel, / an assembly formed by starvation, from scabs & stuttering ribs, / memories of parents slamming doors to ruined flats& the creak of deadbolts in their ear canals.”
“we stood at the edge of the cliff, overlooking the sea, / down in Pacifica, remember, near that Fancy Taco Bell, the one / took my sister to for her prom after her boyfriend Rick / drowned down in Santa Cruz”
“one or two / lines from the poem / using slash to indicate line breaks.”
“your feet grow wet / still you kneel / with the net in your palms / fishing for his cracked pieces / moon jellies floating”
“At the store for more dryer sheets, I see someone slide their hand in an O down some other daughter’s ponytail. I know the next part of the joke—he loops it around her neck like a rope. I was a daughter, too, when I learned daughters are always at the hazard of augers.”
“Everyone is getting ready in the falafel restaurant / they let us use for a dressing room.”
“I wish they could see / everything that survived, everything / that came back, like the drooping / head of an untended flower brought / upright by careful attention.”
“ … I wish / I could show them the widening gyre / of debris choking their Pacific Ocean / reduced to a clear-eyed patch of sea / and the countless animals rehomed / there now.”