Poetry By Bailey Lambeth

Matthew Bellemare CC




Dear, 

I now remember what I came in here for. At your earliest convenience, 
could you give me all the green you have to inhale? The cash I have is useless. 

Civil, please.
​
Like the time I rolled myself out like some hard sheet of river water.
Not the gently curved tributary, not even a pearly trout stream.
Muddy. Lukewarm. River That You Don’t Want To Swallow Water. 
Always happening like that. Flowing downhill and ending at a mouth. 

Not as bad as it sounds. The pet groomer’s wife wore a yellow bouffant
dress. Sweetened with Baccarat Panetelas, Bo Strange told a ghost story.
(A peak above the knee!) Townspeople cried. And once the glimmering
of it all died down, everyone left.  It was an earthly unearthly occasion.
A recently rekindled couple straggled behind, kicking pinecones to suspend
the evening; others skipped home, drunkenly cursing the king. Each separately
grateful to the scared bodies they, for some time, get to call their own. 

Tell them. Tell them how you’re in control here. She does not jump 
from a high story in this one. 

Or maybe she does. Later. Is her face glowing? What do you do with her
afterwards? She wants you to touch her. 





Overwatering

My neighbor’s wind chimes, like the ones my Meme had. At the flea market, a woman answered her granddaughter’s call. Told her she loved her three times and to give the plants out back a drink. I take magnesium instead of anything with diphenhydramine. Turn on brown noise. A flattened bird in the coffee shop’s parking lot this morning. He told me circle of life. I killed the Norfolk pine, put it outside with the trash but they never took it. Kept dying more. Surely it reaches a point. Norfuck Southern. We threw it behind the fence to return it to where it came from. Dry needles, dripping soil. Only in West Monroe would it be this hard to find gluten-free pizza crust. At the third grocery store he drives to, I read the ingredients in line at self-checkout. Dextrose, a long list. Going to storm.





On Falling and Not Yet Landing

I still don’t know how 
tall one must be to forget. 
No, not forget, it’s thicker 
than that. A rock cools 
before erupting. 
I don’t know if mine’s 
the kind to ever reach 
the surface. I wish 
I could still fling myself 
off gathered cliffs, all of that 
red earth, red like when I 
was a child and landing 
quite pleased with myself 
a red sky clung to me. 
But that body is no longer 
mine. My mother will not 
know where to find me 
and the others will have 
gone by now, so I pull 
myself up and it’s red 
internally. I find a tree 
I recognize or some 
rusted piece of memory 
that tells me the street 
I need to walk down 
is that way. 

​


Bailey Lambeth is a 25-year-old resident of Monroe, Louisiana. She does not know much else about herself yet. She has been published in Aurora Poetry, Beyond Words, and Red Noise Collective.