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Chicken Skewer

I reenter my body as a highway, then a Monday, then a demo / of a pop song that never made it to the surface.

Poetry | Poetry Tuesday, poetry
December 3, 2019

I reenter my body as a crab until I realize that a crab
means nothing to me, so I reenter as a lobster,
which ends up being more of the same, and then
his pinchers stop pinching and start holding
back his tears like marbles in a vase.
Outside of my body there is a flock of birds
pecking sapphires out of the sidewalk. They don’t fly
away when I approach but they do start
shouting names – Mateo! Doug! Graham!
Can’t you see this body is yours,
crumpled on the closet mattress after
too much at Skylark. Too much at Currier,
flipping upside down and down
until the direction enters my body and says, OK,
I’ll be your boyfriend, you can hold my hand,
but only when we are in different zipcodes and I’ve had
too much at Scarlet. I promise to keep my flock very small.
We’re just trying this out, chicken and a nickel, video of us
in Times Square, getting eggs from the store
and filling the canvas bag with museums
because we forgot about the eggs.
Michael forgets to say goodnight to me,
and as luck would have it, it’s the night
that my duvet cracks open and all of the cicadas pour out,
start tossing bits of my brain back and forth.
Thomas, you could’ve stopped this!
I reenter my body as all of the oranges in the wooden crate
propped up on 82nd and Amsterdam. It isn’t Amsterdam
without Finn screaming down the afternoon
because he’s supposed to be home by now.
Listen, you’re already home, but you won’t know it
until the boy holding the coffee starts to pack your suitcase
underneath the stairs. And even your sister can’t stop
crying now, salt chalking up the tires of the bus –
I reenter my body as a highway, then a Monday, then a demo
of a pop song that never made it to the surface.
I reenter this room as someone who doesn’t know how
cancer actually causes death but cries
when he thinks about Max and Tim.
And now there’s more crying in this room, reentering
as a presymptomatic blip, Kevin as a movie
and Kevin as a chunk of sapphire who hates
watching movies, who drowns during the previews.
And I am very lonely, haven’t felt together in hours now,
several thousand really. In January I took a weekend trip
to visit my circumstances, gutter slush and blond boys.
I got a stack of pancakes out of the whole ordeal, but then
the pancakes tried to reenter my body
as tickets to a play, and then as a book. Not sure
how much either cost. I’ve been pretty distracted
since I started trying to reenter my body as a coffee mug.
The mug is full, if you know what I mean –
I mean that I still love you, Brandon,
and all my dripping bones and pissy legs and fuzzy eyes
were just ways to zip you up in an Alan-sized wrapper (Alan,
I love you too). We used to do this thing
where we would make an empire and forget
what we were the emperors of. Everyone wants to follow us
but no one will kiss the door. The pinch reenters my body
as cracked eggshells on the ground.