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Pillow Talk, Brunch, then Cowboy Boots by Anne Barngrover and Avni Vyas

October 1, 2013 Contributed By: Anne Barngrover, Avni Vyas

There are worse things to count than failures. Pink and taut,
a slab of meat twitches in the crockpot like a gymnast’s muscle.
Tonight I parse the cook time by redness. When it’s the color of my lips,
it’s time to pour the Wild Turkey and bash in the spider webs. In heels
I can still run, the brunt of my full weight like wet blades
through sugar water. Would I be prettier if I were a cat? I need
you to dazzle my insults with some backhands, please. I’d like them
to sparkle. Sometimes the cracks in my voice are so deep you need a lantern
to get by the three-headed guard rabbit at the gates. You must go barefoot
on the gravel made by brass and deer hooves. I feel chills
in my hands and feet when I cartwheel into a room, but it’s just the spinning
of gold static letting me know that it’s winter now. It has been too long
that the empty children’s lungs are piping that cornflake music.
Love, this all for you. Tonight let’s lie like two bowls about to be cleaned.

Return to table of contents for Issue 7 Summer 2013

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: October 1, 2013

Further Reading

David-Baptiste Chirot interviewed by Jared Schickling: FINDING THE ROOOT – 66 DAYS WITH DAVID-BAPTISTE CHIROT

[extract] this takes place by becoming aware of the flows of time seen in the dust motes in a light coming through the drawn venetian blinds of late winter’s afternoon—and mixing with these whorls of smoke from slowly burning cigarettes—if one begins to look with the sense of time being what one is seeing—then one finds […]

LOVE IS A BLACK HOLE by Chuck Richardson

He’s losing the lot all over again. New routines do not exist. It is mature. Everything chiseled into stone gets digitized, perhaps. Logarithms asexually inhabit the whole thing—nonplussed. The unnamable becomes ineffable as It’s damaged. We are the fabric, stitched together in storms to be torn asunder, too fast and weak for immortality. At one’s […]

LANTERNS by Sanna Stegmaier

The Great Chicago Fire burnt about four square miles, you said and turned your head to the dead factories. A cow tipped over a lantern. I laughed and we stepped on the boat. They took pictures but they couldn’t photograph the heat. I am the bubble of destruction. They call me fairy but I am […]

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