Antoine-Louis Barye, Faon se grattant, 19th century
ROUTINE LOSS
I crave the sweetest drag of menthol, letting nostalgia’s weight
burn me cooly.
Surely I am learning the motion of stunning plummet.
Monotony and its undoing.
I hold a hacksaw to my rib and invest in Growth & Income.
I buy a velvet bucket bag and mourn the death of a single sparrow.
This makes me feel both young and old, and oxymoronic.
That I have always been turning away from my center.
As a rule, I reassess my various uses weekly, think myself rather
capable of nothing.
Things slip in, and through, and past my eyes–and feel altogether
religious.
I knead citronella into the offals of my arm then cut a hole in my
leg to watch the bone glitter.
I photograph a dog with the mane of a lion, behind him his owner
hiding—at once wrecked and palatial.
I remember you and tangle my fingers ornately, as if in the great
heart of an engine.
My fingers failing to verbalize the thin puddle of music.
To mourn the new pillowy form I have come to live in.
Along the shoreline, shrimp trawlers spot the length of distance,
and I think I am here.
Too—and distantly.
Along the shoreline, sea grass makes lazy memories of shape, and
I become the outer edge of porcelain.
I extract weeks of matter from my shoe and realize I am so many
different people.
On my phone I type a line and then another and then another
imagining they will find you.
You in the prison of my mouth.
You in a distal bedform of cool.
You sewn into my fallow.
I think there has got to be more of me than this undertow of rust,
ovary thick of asphalt.
My autofill search results today: charcuterie wreaths, four-way
stretch, sink-in comfort.
My face and that face leaking.
A hurt like the honeyed descent of a saber.
Like a litany of young bodies.
Like a reverie of oxycodone.
I think it will be some time before anyone understands me.
Joint and bone and fluid, wind speed, basilisk—thirst and its
complement hunger.
On Laird Street, a rooster fans its body.
Montage, or montage stiffening.
On Laird Street, a face like a tin of wild noise, cinquefoil of
static.
My body and its wrong cabaret of tinsel.
Viscera on her knees.
EQUAL PARTS IRIDESCENCE
Two black rocking chairs on a porch moving like a country in
mourning.
Someone passes, and I feel them, their subtle geometry.
Time between me and them, sequestered.
Time being far, then farther still.
What is meant by this corridor?
Why do I chisel noise from a tongue when there is ceaseless
Valium?
In the road, a broken perfume bottle, its elaborate wound
glittering.
The sun blinking its body into cloudscapes above, those
clouds taking exact positioning.
On account of the pause of my ribs, there is a terrible
rectangle growing sad inside me.
On account of oxygen and its silken finish, I revel in thinness
—being woodsmoke even.
I find the iguanas in our yard eating the songbird’s eggs, and
on account of them, I want you to know I have always been
pre-confessional.
That I want you to watch me.
Cotton shifts, dirty feet, my uterus heavied like an oil drum.
My arm hairs sad petals.
How I live on my phone.
I have decided I want to hold another’s hand in public.
I have decided I want to become someone who is fearless on
Twitter.
To be 21 again and curled against the radiator.
Boxy and cropped in a cold-water flat, a flat where there has
never been any running water.
A flat where there are no dogs allowed, there are no cats
allowed, and the poem is now somehow inside me.
Like robin blue instance.
Like a sharp whistle, and then then.
I float my arms to know they are with me, let my eyes rattle in
their tiny dens—gelatinous.
I think I can be a naked body, or the concept of nakedness.
I rub myself, and hope God is watching.
A fawn against a bedpost.
A cutaway to a bathroom floor and its bloodied carpet.
A girl with the sad eyes of a goat.
I have become fixated on the eyes, their looking.
I have been looking into an imagined past where all the men
are alpenglow and the rooms we once moved in frothing.
I think it has something to do with pharmaceuticals and their
purple sea fan of memory.
That I am nothing but a grand interpretation of muscle.
The lousy bird of my hair.
Stevie Belchak is a poet and writer living in Key West, Florida. She is the author of State of My Undress (o-blek editions), and has been a finalist for the Metatron Prize for Rising Authors (2022), the BOAAT Poetry Chapbook Prize (2019) and the Center for Book Arts' Poetry Chapbook Prize (2018). Stevie's poetry and nonfiction can be found or forthcoming in Fence Steaming, Third Coast, blush lit, FEELINGS, The Hopper, Pinwheel Journal and La Vague Journal, among many others.