Poetry by Iain Grinbergs

Johnny Blaze CC





My Therapist Says My Exile Is Like Bloo in Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends 

And I have to find him like Mac 
going to the orphanage, a traveler lost 

in a map of crayon, a mother saying 
You’re too old for that as if age is a gate 

where you stop running in checkered Vans. 
Don’t be so sensitive. Man up. Tenderness, 

a costume worn once a year. By a Feltwell swingset, 
I once danced like a weathervane, around 

and around, all elbows, until I didn’t, thinking 
life could be lived in advertisement— 
​
toothy smiles, an endless Bloo-blue sky 
like the ones in New Mexico and above 

my father, who I went searching for 
in that Swaffham house and found finally 

in the spare room, asleep inside his silence, 
and then lost again. Balloon flowers under 

a coverlet of snow. A toy soldier maimed 
by lighter and buried near the trellis 

and Triumph motorcycle. I admit: I went 
into my room and murdered queer  

Sims in ladderless pools and kitchen fires— 
I only modeled myself after God. 

My therapist speaks of other parts, like Managers 
and Firefighters, and a core, sagacious Self. 

You’ve been using your imagination for evil, she says.
Stop it. I know now the cure is accuracy— 
​
I know now to befriend the damage 
and watch it lose hold. 

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Iain Grinbergs (he/they) is an English professor and the author of Vanity Twist, a chapbook (Bottlecap Press). He earned his Ph.D. in English from Florida State University. His work appears in Sho Poetry Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, storySouth, Meridian, Rogue Agent, and other journals.



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