"holding a grudge for years bc i’m wifey" by Meagan Dermody

for k, part 1

I know we are situated in this hour
stretching in all directions to every hour
at each moment        I see us
and do not grieve like a dog I want you to fix
your attention here on me which is too much 
I am not careful and I cannot suffer getting
what I ask for I am growing 
a little fungus of revenge 
and cannot wait to eat it 
and let it rock through me and send me swaying
out there to where I cannot speak
or even salivate   like a dog in high desert sun
I am dry and soft and slow
you are giving me freckles you’re burning me

-

Meagan Dermody is a Southern transplant writing poetry in the Midwest. Her work has appeared in zines including Emily Taylor Center's FEMINIST FRIGHT FEST 2021 zine and RABBIT, as well as literary magazines like PWATEM and Awkward Mermaid. A third-year MFA student at the University of Kansas, Meagan's work engages with trauma, ecosomatics, and the divine/grotesque/divine. She prides herself on being fun at parties and in the line at the grocery store, and is working hard to keep her aloe plant alive.

"Breakfast of a Lush" and "Cocaine Breakfast" by G.L. Ford

Breakfast of a Lush

We arrived, strong of back and weak-willed,
took our places and prayed for death.
I looked around and thought, Me
and my hobo socks are going north,
take the revolver along.
But there was smoking to be done,
though the harvest had been poor,
and once you know there’s that much sky
it’s hard to get away from it.
Evening was always a maudlin affair,
polite as a heatless match and just as colorful,
a time to caress old grievances,
craft fine and useless scandals,
gaze at the dishes, risk sitting down.
My job was to make sleep difficult.
No one ever mentioned if it worked.
But every time it bothered coming
we’d ravish the flimsy dawn.

Cocaine Breakfast

Your mouth of hair,
your eye of dandelion stems,
your brain of gleaming whirlygig shit—
I don’t love anything near you.
I want to break my heart with a violin,
but this isn’t music, and you know it.

What tempers you?
Does your hand, any hand, remind you of anything?
I’d call it catalepsy, but it’s just your stare,
so lay off the halleluiahs.
It’s like replacing a lost tooth with one that won’t stop growing,
so you learn to gnaw.

Right now I doubt you’ve ever seen morning.
Your tongue’s a crumpled wire.
Your gums are pristine ash.
You giggle very well
and have a daunting vocabulary.
You have no smell.

I know you have pockets,
full of the usual keepsakes,
but I’m in no mood for that ritual right now.
If you need it, the window opens,
there’s plenty of air if you think you want it,
we’re five flights up and it’s easy to get down.

-

G. L. Ford lives and works in Victoria, Texas. He is the author of Sans, a book of poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). He helped edit the "6x6" poetry periodical from 2000 to 2017, and formerly wrote a column for the free paper New York Nights.