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9/27/2020 Poetry by Brittany Coffman Mitchell Hopkins CC the looking church It is raining and there is a phoenix on the street corner selling tickets To a show no one will ever see his red plumage scattered at his feet While his neighbor the hound avoids his own tawny complexion in The mirror a group of ibex run past with branches cradled over their Heads startling twenty-three conspiracy pigeons and one assassin cat The badger behind the wheel of an expensive beetle with silver horns Locked together with a short orange giraffe suffering from a mad god Complex she won’t ever make the front page run by some sort of scarab Cult and their fascination with spiders and their snatched snip politics Printed off the hides of the pups who lived in that alley once upon a time It is raining and there is a peacock carrying too many feathers in her arms To the office where she is devoured by asking blue eyes and unwanted Claws in another block a fox slipping an emerald into her coat pocket She’ll sell it to that jackrabbit the white one covered in gold body glitter Living above a deli with druggie bluegills and their grey water cameras The lonely black bear sitting on that empty stoop his ears cropped to Perfection once upon a time but now limp like the old sloth too slow for Change who was gobbled up by that tricky adder in the city’s basement While the weasels stood on their hind legs and watched with petty grins As a sparrow pushed a stroller past a group of smoking leather stallions It is raining and the flamingos go to school with their ballet shoes they all Look the same at least in a cluster the neon panther hurrying them along While a raven flies overhead her talons filled with love notes from her Lover a pretty quetzal more queer than she is cousins with the lion who Rents downtown in a flat made of skin and stolen yellow beehives. (In) Over My Head don’t listen to a word I say it cantbreathecantbreathe doesn’t seem don't believe me / malignant like the t r u t h self - my mind - destruct is truth a thing I want it to be or is that just me m ind reading? remind me.
I’m trying I swear this may-be dying the words are blurry again d obsessive stop. r own ing I’m crying vulnerable up cantbreathe feelings make your mind over c h oking me here/ up whelmed keeping me here the mind’s make fear damage malignant ; contagious is this what I am un hinged is a dangerous thing to be figure out how to this mind viper Love&Resistance I’m looking at their faces. At their purely naked bodies and their ability to push and be pushed. I’m blown away. Rainbows didn’t exist then, but the presses did and they were hot and wild and they were lovely. I’m reading their words and holding them up to my own heart to see if they match; I will never be as brave. I came out to my dad we were sitting on the couch watching television. I’d written a lengthy paragraph in the notes app of my phone it had seemed the right thing to do at the time. They pushed and pushed and were pushed out of windows and onto the spikes of pitchforks and I didn’t know. I arrived too late to have known before. I’m looking into the faraway eyes of a likely-dead lesbian with a sign that reads: I am your worst fear. I am your best fantasy. She’s beautiful. I would have loved to meet her, to speak with her. I want to meet them all, every single one. They are all of them courageous and lovers and lovers always win. Even then. I felt foolish reading my dad the memo. like reciting modern Shakespeare something equally dramatic / I felt really just me trying to explain, to figure out how I should do this all I should have done was just say it. They were selling LGBTQ postcards in the gift shop. Though I could see a pair of rotten capital -ist hands all over of them, I bought four in black and white. In one, a class photo of transgender men and women. One of the women wears an apron and carries a rolling pin. My dad was quiet “okay.” what I expected from him the next morning he had “googled me” so he knew for sure what pansexuality meant when I was so afraid that I still didn’t. I’m looking into their faces, wondering what kind of people they were. I’m assuming they are all long gone now. Still they are bold and beautiful and I hope that they died in bed as someone loved and not at the end of a pitchfork or a burning pyre. I could probably find out their true fates but somehow that seems disrespectful to their memories. Or maybe they’d want me to know. Respect has to be earned. I was so scared it was fear. Fear that I was making this up (to belong) or trying to be something I wasn’t I stayed awake all night thinking and doing “research” trying to make sense of it I’d never thought about it I was ______ or this since the beginning sex wasn’t something I ever really thought about but love was and attraction I was learning fluid for me. That was a relief I didn’t know I needed the framework wasn’t so rigid I could be with X/Y/someone all of a sudden I could know that mattered to me.  Brittany Coffman is a 20-year-old poet and fiction writer based in New York. Her writing explores dark corners as a way to portray language. She enjoys creating weird and wonderful expressions of the mundane and fantasy.
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