3/29/2021 Poetry by Cara Losier Chanoine ClickFlashPhotos / Nicki Varkevisser CC
Nightlife doughnuts cookies whatever you call it when you pull the e-brake in a fast-moving car on a stretch of snow in an abandoned parking lot and spin out in the circumference of a messy circle we were fifteen and sixteen and nineteen and there was never anything much to do especially in the winter when the darkness ate up all our hours and called for mischief like a junkie’s thirsty veins it was the best we could do the most alive we could feel in the closed-down dark after all the businesses were shuttered and we were left alone with all our young blood insatiable beneath our skin Your Own Accuser Have you ever woken up feeling like a knife fight because all the people you used to love came to you while you slept, bringing with them all the ways in which you failed them? Is the taste of it like a battery leaking in your mouth? Does it make you mourn the lives you used to live? In the half-life hours of the morning, do you yearn for absolution? Green Monday there is a bomb that blooms green in the street rips up the asphalt and settles, like the green pallor of death-rattle sickness like a green day in April built from runners’ tangled legs and Jackson Pollack vomit stains green like spoiled, severed limbs like the tarnished fixtures of tea chests in the harbor this is the shrapnel that the skin heals over green like when you open your eyes at the bottom of a pool-- and it burns like that, too whenever someone puts their thumbs in your scars pinches the pale of your bruises as a reminder like you could possibly forget like that busted-open street isn’t branded onto the insides of your eyelids green paint on red canvas, red blood tipping green leaves in April this is how some people learn what to hate it greens all the villains and paints the heroes in red white and blue and it must be simpler for them but there is no logic in chaos no formula for safety and sometimes maybe we’d like a world with more certainty but we cannot separate it back into primary colors this precarious green thing balanced upon the precipice of two extremes now a green dusk sets upon the street and the ghosts of amputees lurk in the long, green shadows but people walk here like they can’t see the scars Cara Losier Chanoine is the author of 'How a Bullet Behaves' and 'Bowetry: Found Poems from David Bowie Lyrics' (Scars Publications). She is a four-time competitor at the National Poetry Slam and her work has appeared in DASH, Red Fez, The Threepenny Review, and other publications. Comments are closed.
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