Skull Planter with Cactus for Brains, and: But You Don't Look Pansexual
Rent from DeepDyve- Skull Planter with Cactus for Brains, and: But You Don't Look Pansexual
Skull Planter with Cactus for Brains
You can't have a breakthroughwithout something getting broken.What wouldn't I have riskedonce; & what I still do, talkingas if wearing a leg-of-mutton-sleeved blouse in a house of mirrors.If rhythm's how sound works.If a poem's a map of feeling howyou think. Stretching, Carl remindsthe class our air is the same airCleopatra exhaled & if that's truethen it's also the same air dinosaursreleased their all their complexity& farts into. Dust storms on Mars,zephyrs on Pluto. My cancer-riddled sister-in-law channelsall her energy into fighting.You park in her spot, she goes outwild-eyed, sword raised, spitting& swearing. When people stareat her broken face, the eye drooping,the ear all but disappeared beneaththe bandages, the convex madeconcave, if I'm there I stare back harder.If my face wore disease. If the bonesin my skull existed in a stateof necrosis. But I'm not that battle-strong. I wash a dish, rinse it in tepid watera leviathan creature near breaches. [End Page 95] To say my heart fists about in my chest.Standing in the room's middle I screeched.Raw pitch. Screeched again like I meant it.Let this serve as my suicide so I don't haveto kill myself to die, thought I to myself.It was good to empty. To fill the roomwith. To send my voice back to bronto-phobia, to mud, the ether. To cleavein the thread, a mark.
But You Don't Look Pansexual
How many perfectly empty of tectonics notebooks did I finger the spine of before settling on
this one? Iwanted its vastness
to be enteringan orange field
of dragon-flies land-
ing nearby;the air to smell
of distant fire;that the ground
squelchunderfoot.
As not to spoil it how long I waited to write in it & when I did how the fountain pen cephalopoded.
Flower Conroy, LGBTQ+ poet, is the author of the chapbooks Facts about Snakes and Hearts, The Awful Suicidal Swans, and Escape to Nowhere. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literary Review, Michigan Quarterly, the Penn Review, and others. She is the current poet laureate of Key West, FL.
