Poetry by S. Cristine

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MASLOW’S HIERARCHY OF YEARNING

I want to swallow stars from the sky like a mouthful of cool water,
I want to eat yellow sunlight with my bare hands,
I want to climb trees like birds do, lifting off the branches,
I want to feel impossible sensations,
to see like an insect, hear like a dog,
open my eyes underwater in the ocean without the sting of salt,
I want to be a martyr like Saint Sebastian, strung up with an arrow in my side,
or maybe just to be a good person, with two cats and a decent job,
I want to have chocolate on Tuesdays and steak on Sunday nights
and to hang framed photographs of myself as an infant on every wall,
I want to have the moments between my breaths be finally unlabored,
I want to tattoo my bottom teeth and pierce my right eyebrow,
I want to own every unreleased Morrissey album on limited-press vinyl,
I want to sit up straight and to know how to shoot a gun,
I want to grow my hair out past my shoulders for once in my goddamned life,
I want to live at the edge of the universe and expand beyond time,
I want to have tits like Pamela Anderson and to be a natural blonde,
I want to be without wanting, to desire endless nothing,
to grasp infinity like a mother wolf holds her cub in her jaws
without biting down, no matter how much she might want to,
I want to raise my hands above my head and hold them there forever. 

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IN TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, NEW MEXICO

Let’s say you’re singing karaoke alone at a dive bar in the middle of the desert, Blondie, or maybe Springsteen, and let’s say the bar is full but nobody is cheering you on, and they all laugh when your voice sharps on the high note, and let’s say you had an older brother once, and he was tall and kind and handsome, someone to fall in love with when you were seven the way only children do, and let’s say he moved to this town to grow up and never came back, and now you’ve got twice as much dirt under your fingernails than he ever will – so let’s say there’s a kind of cigarette that kills you instantly, and let’s say you’ve gone through the back door and smoked it, but instead of dying you wake up standing in a clear windowpane of light in the valley, right where the sun falls like rain from the split in the cloud cover above, and let’s say it feels like winter when it passes over your shoes, and let’s say you lie down in it and bite off a chunk of your own tongue, and the blood in your mouth is sweet and fresh and the only thing in the world that really belongs to you, this world with its animal stench of decay and instinct and rotation after rotation – let’s say you stay there forever, looking up into the sky, never blinking, but still moving at the speed of sound.

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S. Cristine is an emerging poet living and writing in her native Los Angeles. Her work has previously been published in or is forthcoming from The Passionfruit Review, DOG TEETH, and the LA-based literary reading series Car Crash Collective's first anthology volume. You can find her online on Twitter/X at @ standrdbrunette. 
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