"Free Pretzels" and "Mysterious Refrigerator" by Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo

Free Pretzels

a man excuses himself from the intimacy

of spending seconds in my space

space is relative this high and

pressure is cabinated

we are explaining ourselves

formally and boxlike

and my hat has a bill that cages

my sightline like a hand arced

for cover. i have paid for access

to a rectangle of space. i tilt

my rectangle backwards

parallelogramlike

i am in control

of whether this man may relieve

himself in an irregular shape

of a room. whoosh

fluids go somewhere no one

knows (our pilot incidentally 

late a tiny god called forth

to hurtle people, dogs

through space as fast as

possible commercially

full throttle navigation

button activation

peering down at blips

in the abyss below

cranking levers backwards

halting bodies and metal

from motion)

objects in mirror 

are really really close

Mysterious Refrigerator

someone is sneaking into my basement 

and turning off my heat. the heat becomes

cold. i am a person predisposed

to coldness. i shake with it. 

a lover buys me slippers.

upon being plugged in they glow

supernaturally warm. this is the sort

of supernatural phenomenon in which 

I am interested. albert camus 

said something about autumn.

how it is “a second spring

when every leaf is a flower.”

i learned this quote from a leaflet

sent to me in the mail. it is possible

this quote has been misattributed

or even manufactured. it might be

supernatural. flowers and leaves 

seem to fulfill different roles. 

just because i happen 

to be cold i am not

preparing to fall down. collapse

is not always imminent. obviously.

i am uninterested in heroic journeys

or what it means to fly overhead.

who is tunneling into my basement? 

flowers in ice water

they say, live to bloom 

longer

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Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo is an MFA candidate at Rutgers University-Camden, where she has recently written about deer, hand models, and trees. She is the author of the chapbook "DUH" (Bullshit Lit), and her work appears or is forthcoming in Passages North, Barrelhouse Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, and Bedfellows Magazine, among others. She can be followed @tall.spy (Instagram) and @tall__spy (Twitter) but she can never be caught.