Always through glass you screamed into yourself
before July knew you before Newports before morphine and blank-slate
catharsis through county fair dry heat wet cotton candy vomit on asphalt and there
Daddy sweats oils and carcinogens shrieks fury bellows candor he
echoes holy illness he is chapped and necking with indigence he is
fifty years old and holding you by the wrist taking you to heathen
gods who breathe peek-a-boo, you are doomed and you’re salty in susurrus sobbing
honey gumming eyelids viscid and glistening glazed like windows like his eyes after –
I am sorry
jarred childhood on the carousel and
killjoy filler remember black dahlia remember lust remember bottleneck choke and tang
I’ll
let you be sawtoothed let you soak in stagnation let
my hotels grow stale leering through peepholes pillow mints melted face
neighbors coughing phlegm lungs all rot and entropy so you
overdose on lullaby and angel dust smoke disassociation
pathologically drowning transience in a flash flood of ether
quickly gorging yourself on lapse and navel-gazing you
ran laughing into the arms of
some soft eggshell canopy where mother waits smelling of
turpentine like when you were a child and played God
under the nothing sky coyote song tearing holes pulping life becoming
vacant and after rats there were Gilas and then jackrabbits and finally
women preening then sloshing beautifully to the soft eggshell floor brittle limbs now
xenophobic membranes ripped apart thorax and abdomen merging
you said death will know us all you dissolved into trees you dissected yourself
you sat down on the Ferris wheel rode it to its
zenith and you rode round and round round and round all through the town.
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Naomi Bartlett lives in Nashville, TN. She spends her days writing, painting, playing the drums, and plotting her escape from the food service industry. She is currently working on completing her BA at Belmont University.