SIX POEMS by LINDSAY HARGRAVE
Daffodils pt. II
This place smells like mint again which
means it’s spring,
it’s March,
it’s only fucking Tuesday,
and the produce needs
to last all week.
But it smells like mint again which
means one of three things:
Either the mice are back,
daffodils are coming early or
this nightmare is recurring.
It’s always something. Last year’s
bedbugs. This year’s
disappointing. Next year’s
bottleneck
came too soon.
I insist
This is the last time I will blot out my pupils. It’s not often that my jaw comes unhinged like this—i suppose I’m only nervous or smelling with my tongue. I have felt greater dust floating through the atmosphere, sticking to every wet esophagus and living where the victims go to sleep. You say it hurts and I wish I had the nerves to really get it, but you know how the undead can be.
Death Oracle
Healing unripen like the
sun like the
fruiting like the shrivel,
peeling and freeing won’t
be the next season’s bleaching;
seething in tears in dust in
wine in twisted steel you
look for your reflection there
you bury yourself in rubble you
dance like the asbestos you stick to
like grief.
Heliogleam on the bonejaw split,
hexed into kaleidoscope,
cursing way to see
the somebody whose aching
ashes are in your closet who
never left who’s
not allowed to,
tethered to the earth
by your sands and
swirling through your
television.
Lilith
I am drawn to
Autumn’s horror,
to cast
grey skies and barren fields
not a harvest goddess,
empty womb,
scorched earth beneath me
cut by wisp of sage
more bitter than
the chill, a bladed air
holding hilts between spindles
a wave unseen
how deep, how long am I
already winding
if the acid in each link
already waits behind my teeth?
The ghost of me is in these pages,
the ghost is sliding between the lives
sustained on vinegar, the ones pinching
pins into their ankles lest they
inch toward salvation.
It’s like
I always eat the most
when I’m starving
on stuff like
gold and humidity,
crying for attention,
the infrared kind,
to shatter the
evening I’ve
developed.
The horses helping
humans in the
sky.
Carving it out on
bliss, gently, on
bliss.
Libra
Stunning like a
lightning sky,
vapid like an
empty morning.
Holding like a
necessity,
repelling like
oil.
Surrounded like
a hostage,
alone like a
hostage.
Lindsay Hargrave is a poet, one quarter of the improvised music group Oarsman, the author of a poetry column in the Philly Plain Dealer, and a copywriter for Temple University. Read more at linktr.ee/Hargrave or follow @notporkroll on Twitter.