Five Poems

by //|

The Price of Okra

Lit crit with the speedo architect aw god what a narky bitch
When lambo, buy the dip
two suicides off the Williamsburg Bridge

all this Fire Island modernism
and the sun like a mouthful of vodka.
Coleridge is here, and Lulu. “I’m working

on a building,” Speedo says, “that’ll fuck you
like the price of okra.” I don’t get it. I’m mid-
point on a bell curve. Lulu is releasing years

of trauma watching the birds make a dress for
Cinderella. Flippening/flappening, pump and dump.
How fast can you catch an STD?

Cedar siding, post-and-beam, Canasta and charades
no lawns, no fences, suspended floors that draw the breezes
like silk assets and wrap dresses —yes

a close reading is open to suggestion, like
hunger and harm and my second sex. Someone
takes a polaroid of Speedo’s deck, someone

slut walks from Vienna to The Met, someone
makes a margarita as we paint the walls without the edges.
When moon, buy the dip

I draw a line of beauty from your stomach to your hip.
The novel is dead. The novel is dead
Someone put on Pet Sounds because Brian Wilson’s dead.

 

The Blue Terrace

We love without demand
and bitch with a tender eye
like the pull of Hockney’s pool paintings
all that afternoon light
splashing this way and that
and Nick’s pale ass
Have you ever seen a paler ass
or a bluer terrace
or more loneliness
as the sun in its white trunks?

We’re never lonely at Paul’s house
fridge of beer
good tequila
reggaeton
Susana in the bath
that poet that everyone says
is almost
American surrealism
and the other one who writes abt boardwalks
and the blue & red of Giotto,

the splash
a bigger splash
God we’re a snooze
So many mediocre poets
doing so many mediocre things
Like John’s old dick
I can barely stir in the sunlight like a hyacinth
Susana is posting her tan lines
I told her I was happy for her
I lied a bit
like so many little things
vying for attention.

 

Playland

Maybe I don’t care enough about the testament of poor Villon
or why the boys are eating danish on the beach.
Pilates, adoration, mass

a glorious orgasm of Marian grottoes,
in their weekend king Chubbies my heart drawn out in twenty strokes.
Keta / MINE. And Debbie on the decks with oyster mouth—

O punch cut the cigar. Again I dreamt I died on the other
side of innocence. Dead again in the National Gallery. Cursed
like finding peanuts in the cockpit at the Indy. Me be cool

with Madge. Be cool with Diana. Straight jack it, modern
power. Running red lights on Route 1A. Waves like spilt
pills, foamy mouths. Dick thick chocolate shell. Clench-

and-crack, curious pout. That’s how they do it in Dubai.
All jaw and then a whipping at the cart’s tail. To Dear Harry
Boy everything could have been so perfect, like acid revealing

an invisible script. Neck muscle and Nikon. Pinball at Playland.
I’m bitter over sweet, an unkept bikini. I’m black habits singing
hymns to the amusement of passing boats.

 

Rapture

O Hannah
you spell your name with two of everything.
It’s the summer of the comet.
I want to vibrate like an angel
and you’re reading a book
that isn’t a gift
for anyone over thirty.
Everything tends towards a conclusion that doesn’t occur.
I have no defense for poesy.
Does anyone know how to get to the Bop House?
The whole shit is breaking down
and my refrigerator isn’t ready for riot season.
John Maus has a new single called I Hate Antichrist.
What do we talk about when we talk about luxury?
You’re reading A Poem for Vipers when lifeguards
pull a dead swimmer
from the water off Hampton Beach.
The weather is beautiful.
I eat aspirin for dinner and drink Rolling Rock.
Karen Read is framed like a Nantucket sunset.
O Hannah
we lost two of everything.
On the rooftop
of an apartment on Ashworth Ave
we watch a cumshot
dance on the tip
of a
telescope.


Labor Day

I’m going to eat them
I tell Jill when she asks
what’s going to happen to the kids

it’s Neddy’s Labor Day party
and we’re standing by the pool;
Jill is drunk, bulwarked in white

and once my dirty laundry
becomes the state of the nation
she bats her eyes one too many times

Jill never liked my wife
and in broad daylight her warpaint
is merciless

she leans in
touches my arm and says
no, really, what about the kids

it’s the same proposal
my wife had eight years ago;
I know how to wash laundry

I say, and air out a cannonball
that makes Ned’s modest pool
heave with misfortune.

Let’s Start from an Earlier Block of Save Data

by //|

I remember the first time we played Minecraft.
Years ago. We spawned in a barren snow biome.
Resources were scarce. We needed food,
so we killed some cows and pigs for raw meat.
Then we spent a long time walking
before we found a tree to punch for some wood.
It was nighttime by then, which means
skeletons were appearing and shooting
us with arrows. They shot our little square heads
and our little square legs and arms and hands
until our screens went red and we were back
at our spawn point with nothing. We rushed
back to our death-piles to reclaim the wood
we had dropped, but immediately got pummeled
with arrows again. Red screen. You Died! Spawn point.
Repeat. We kept trying until a square sun replaced
the square moon and so much time had passed
that our wood had despawned from the ground.
I felt genuine sadness when I realized it was gone.
When you don’t have enough of something
you need, anything can feel like everything.

And I feel that sadness again today
as I grieve standing in front of the toilet, flaccid penis
in hand, a leftover droplet of urine plunging to its death.
I’m not grieving for the urine itself, or for the clear water
I’ve just dyed the color of a pixelated golden apple.
I’m grieving because of the skid mark.

Your skid mark.

Last night’s skid mark.

The skid mark you left on the side
of the toilet bowl before you packed
your bags and got into your mom’s car.

I’m grieving because I drank too much beer
and self-hatred today, and in my fucked-up state,
I didn’t catch myself power-washing
your skid mark from existence.

I never wanted to make it — or you — disappear.
I never wanted to send you back to your spawn point.

Last night’s argument was chaos. Hard mode.
I don’t know why we were speed-running.
We should have zoomed out.
We should have tried different camera angles.
We should have eaten some raw steak and pork,
kept still until our heart meters replenished,
let the skeletons burn in the sun.

The Bee Charmer

by //|

There’s a woman in town who performs
healing with a net. I pay to watch

the show, front row, metal folding chair
creaking in the spring grass,
half-brown, half-waking.

She sets the scene like a traveling circus—
a communion of strangers searching
for something together at the edge

of the woods—bodies watching
body brave contortion, brave
the sting.

She stands alone in the center of us, near
the bees. We sit silently and watch
as she laces honey-lacquered twine

around her face, her head. Then
she opens the hive to let the bees swarm
around her most delicate organs.

The sight is beautiful and terrifying
and it’s hard to look away.
But I close my eyes.

I remember that I came here to feel
the bees, not to see them. To be close
to their noise without being
their first target.

I’ve heard that being in the presence
of bees can calm the mind.

I’ve heard that we are attracted to
the things that we fear the most—our body’s
dress rehearsal for disaster.

Sometimes I wish for the worst so that
I don’t have to keep waiting for it.

I imagine drenching myself
in honey. I imagine the bees leaving
my mind and kissing my body

quietly in the grass.
Then contortion, then sting.

Now hum, now
stillness. Now the sound of the grass,
waking.

Contact

Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll let you know as soon as our first call drops. Don’t worry, we will literally only email you when we have a rare event, when a call drops, and when new editions go live. And you can opt out any time.

© Copyright - Pool Party