FIVE POEMS by CHARLIE WOLFGANG HARMON
BIG SUR
On the cliff-side, a woman chucks her keys
into the ocean and dives in after them. Her pose
is what skateboarders call a Christ air. She bobs,
hair seal-slick and halo banded with heliolatry.
She trails rich kelp and homeless hermit crabs
on her way back to her Subaru in visitors parking.
A surfer moons us while he slips into artificial
blubber. We throw Kerouac’s swollen corpse at him.
Later, we consult our oracle, feed her a shiny, round
thing. Did we do bad? We turn the crank. It churns
a gumball out. In some realities, it says, I am made
of feldspar and mica. You’d break your jaw on me.
We’re tired, so we lie in the wet sand and pull
a duvet of foam to our chins. When the neap tides
draw our covers back, it’s back to work. A large clam
washes ashore. I extricate the sea baby from its plush
tongue, then bury it in the sand. After 17 years, it
will emerge and run towards the moon screaming.
TRACTOR BEAM
I emerge from the messy twist of my bedsheets, damp
with Effexor night sweats, like Bela Lugosi’s honeybee—
or the stray armadillo shambling past its tiny Transylvanian coffin.
I, too, am ungainly and out of place. Still trying to live
in days shot as night. It is so hard to be goth, especially
in these summers where the earth is just an Orbeez split
by a hot knife, and the stealthy grapefruit juice of an innocuous cocktail
no-scopes a low dose anti-depressant. Yet, there are moments to savor,
like the chopped, cauliflower ears of a rescued pit bull
standing guard for her mama at the ATM—or the stranger
who unknowingly got “the gay ear” pierced (the right instead of left, I guess)
but still wears the rhinestone stud, even when his fellow
straights point it out, and then sit in their discomfort. I love
that silence, like when a skater disrupts a shoegaze living room
full of craft beer and well-read misogynists with, “that’s fucked up, dude,”
and there’s a delicious beat before the back pedaling begins.
I’m always struck by the how bad the men’s toenails are when we look down
at the crunchy carpet in these moments. They aren’t even old yet,
and would be put-off if the women they knew had feet like theirs. The fan overhead
hiccups and ticks, mimics the ocean breeze of a complicated childhood.
For added effect, it unsticks the glow-in-the-dark stars
and pushes hot air around, provides relief for the housecat
plastered directly beneath it, transfixed by the little chain whipping lazily
above in a blurry conical shape. A small cow waiting for the UFO to beam it up.
THIS MESSAGE WILL REPEAT
I eat a super burrito on the curb, impervious
in a pair of mom jeans, and contemplate rose gold
or plum-colored hair dye. If I hold salad
in your mind’s eye, it’s not me. That’s my evil
doppelganger, a sad bitch who counts calories.
You see, a sprinkled donut is my weapon
of choice. It can be whatever icing flavor.
Whatever it is you like best, but within reason.
My coworker smokes and a rat scurries past.
Need I remind you, that the sign outside
the bathroom door said OMEN. It turns out,
in the worst timeline, toilet paper is scarce.
I’m spit on for deigning to wear a mask
mid-transaction, my hand in the till, hovering over
crumpled bills and rubber bands, warm coins.
Didn’t I tell you? I thought a diamondback fell
into my lap, but it was just the shower caddy
prone to jump scare. So, like an alchemist pissing
through his wife’s wedding ring, I hurl
clutches of baby teeth into the cretaceous, orange sky
on my lunch break. Barbeque sauce consistency
blots my panty liners for the thousandth time
while incarcerated Californian women fight fires
for $2 a day. My cervix pinches. A cobra kiss,
or what Amy Hempel describes as one. That’s what I want.
Fizzy pomegranate juice, ice cold rum. Vesuvio murmurs
approvingly on my right as a friend smashes
his beer glass on the ground, just in front
of the anti-vaxxer who actively stage-coughed
on the next table. It is a warning shot that rankles a wannabe
tough guy—so I unzip the pouch where I keep my taser.
It’s usually reserved as a deterrent to aggressive catcallers
in their New Balance shoes, the ones who ask
where the business section is and get mad
when we don’t carry The Fountainhead. Somewhere,
a forked tongue touches melted plastic and recoils.
Redwoods singe and mix with Paradise’s drywall,
gluey strands of Barbie hair, and human bone particles.
Someone falls to their knees and begs to drink
water from the mouth of a young foal.
Laugh all you want—unless you’ve burned down
a Chase bank, then you are a hero in my eyes.
But I reckon that those most estranged by my poetry
still try to appease the gods of capital when they must
instead dethrone them. And when a new variant
hits us again, it will hit harder. Yet my wage remains
unlivable. I am told that the sugar moon is good news.
Even so, everywhere I go, I’m in a mask
for COVID, wildfire ash, or pretending I’m sorry
that we cannot match Amazon’s prices or do Apple Pay.
I walk the daily BART commute, the grocery store,
from the register shift to the current Craigslist house,
calling out: “corner,” “behind you,” “knife.”
WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING
I took the liberty of writing “this machine
kills fascists” on the underside of your Furby,
the punished one who sounds like an old god.
I contacted the lesbian mafia—meaning,
I texted our shared pentacle of friends.
I thought too much about the strawberries
we saw, labeled slightly imperfect.
I went down a rabbit hole via Wikipedia, learned
that Alfred Nobel was called the merchant
of death—fitting, then, that Barack Obama
and other war criminals won his peace prize.
I microwaved my cold mug of tea,
and retrieved it before the sharp beep.
I dreamt of the coming revolution.
I dreamt of our daughter. You’d teach her
how to hunt, to know what the moss means, to love
without immunity, to make a Molotov cocktail.
I dreamt of us getting into our unmade bed,
careful not to wake the cat, and the woman
with the owl mask standing in the corner,
quietly eating the cereal I laid out for her.
She can’t hold her scythe if she’s eating.
LES LÈVRES ROUGES (1971)
Imagine death by crystal salad bowl, or pressing one down
onto a man’s face in an attempt to suffocate him, only for it to
split like a chocolate orange. What do you mean, it was a cloche?
Whatever, Ilona—I wanted to say sorry for your shallow grave
hand dug in the dunes. I stayed out there until 4 AM for you.
Doesn’t ‘hand dug’ sound like a bougie descriptor for something
you liked when you were alive, like ‘slow-churned’ ice cream?
Well, 4 AM is a lot for me, but perhaps you’ll appreciate the fact
that I swerved into a retired cop pedaling in the bike lane. Look,
what I’m trying to say is, I never would’ve told you to sleep
with him had I known how cluttered his bathroom sink would be.
Seeing you motionless on the tiles, I admired your
tasteful pubes. It was too much—unfeminist, even—that his razor
killed you. If it’s of any consolation, that blonde middle-part
bitch neglected to put the sun visor down when we sped for the border.
The car spun out, but we somehow hit a tree with such force
I violently defenestrated the windshield, hurdled into the woods,
and got impaled by a wayward branch jutting out from an old log.
Yes, you needn’t ask where it ran me through—stakes, hearts, yadda, yadda.
I saw her take my cape as the flames licked their way across the asphalt,
and crept to my all-organic, locally sourced, cedarwood pyre.
Maybe that was for when you ditched my drink for me, remember?
The gooey blue, Pepto-Bismol monstrosity in the martini glass. I saw—
you poured it on the roots of the hotel’s parlor palm. The concierge
dragged it out to the curb when we came back from shoveling
sand over your body, and it looked bad. Some may think it stupid,
what you did. Your outdated hair, also stupid--a bowl cut--but I know you
would say the same thing of me: my pencil thin eyebrows, dyed ostrich
feathers, or Dietrich waves. My tendency to drain, then discard.
Thank goodness we could agree on a shade of lipstick—almost
a giallo red. We saved so much on makeup. The shade, like
the flashing lights at a railroad crossing that disrupt an overnight train’s
rocking cadence, rattle the untouched silverware. Stain
the crumpled white sheets shared by two lovers. You know, the red
lights that made us look like girls sharing a moment in a dark room
while our negatives developed. The ones that made us possible.
Charlie Wolfgang Harmon (he/him) is a poet, gaymer, Furby enthusiast, and former indie bookseller turned public librarian based in the Bay Area. He has an MFA in poetry from Saint Mary's College of California. His work is a potpourri of queer trans antics, ghosts, sticky hands, and anti-capitalist musings. His Twitter and Instagram are both @PunishedFurby.