7/10/2016 0 Comments Three poems by Leah MuellerFRACTURE You dabbled in sentiment and it felt good while it lasted. For years, you kept the glass ball suspended on your fingertips. You held the sphere aloft, and it rotated slowly in the sunlight, while you stared at it, hypnotized. I was that ball, until the light grew dull and shattered: or maybe you were that ball, I no longer remember. Now someone sweeps the pieces from the floor, but neither of us recognizes him. He refuses to look us in the eye. The shards disappear into the dustpan and the floor is clear. but the gray air is filled with the drooping weight of all the rain that will never fall. FREE-RANGE TEENS I worried about promiscuity when I was seventeen, and its alignment with moral character. I felt certain I had sacrificed my own values without much resistance, and I feared this would go on a permanent record that would reflect badly on me, later. In secret locations, I furtively opened medical pamphlets, library books, and paperbacks I'd bought at yard sales. I read everything I could about penises and vaginas, eagerly devoured details about their angles and dimensions. I gorged myself with gaudy images, but felt sick afterward, as if I'd eaten too many hamburgers. My boyfriend and I had an elaborate ritual that summer- I spread out my body on his basement couch like a cheap buffet. While my head nestled in his lap, my boyfriend probed the inside of my vagina one furtive digit at a time, until he was finally able to place his entire hand inside me, at least as far as his knuckles. His parents never came downstairs, and never asked what we were doing: it was 1970s America, and they couldn't have been less interested. We ate hot dogs in bright red baskets at the drive-in afterward, and my boyfriend talked about planets and where he was going to college in the fall. None of my moral pronouncements made a goddamn bit of difference, because our parents and geography would shove us so far apart that we would never find each other again. Milkshakes and sex were all we had at the moment- the viscous sweetness of cream, and rapid metabolisms that would make it much easier to forget everything. CAFE ROKA A desert dessert of green sorbet in a small glass cup while outside the mountains disappear, and the turrets vanish into black. Unlearning noise takes time, and you have less of it than ever. The Pluto line of death and mines runs underneath the soil, buried yet moving. You perch above the fault line, spoon poised in mid-air, try not to fall off your chair. Some day you will die here like your ancestors, or make a clean getaway, and be instantly forgotten like the dust of bones. Meanwhile the sorbet rolls down your throat and keeps you alive for a while longer, until the check finally arrives. Bio: Leah Mueller is an independent writer from Tacoma, Washington. She is the author of one chapbook, “Queen of Dorksville” (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2012), and two full-length books, “Allergic to Everything” (Writing Knights Press, 2015) and “The Underside of the Snake” (Red Ferret Press, 2015). Her work has been published in Blunderbuss, Sadie Girl Press, Origins Journal, Talking Soup, Silver Birch Press, Yellow Chair Review, Cultured Vultures, and many other publications. She is a regular contributor to Quail Bell magazine, and was a featured poet at the 2015 New York Poetry Festival. She was a runner-up in the 2012 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry contest.
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