Is For Lovers
August takes Virginia slow and heavy.
Inescapable, inevitable, the state leans
in with a feline stretch. Hyacinths bloom
in reverse. Everything bends, absorbing
the weight of water.
Nothing to do but wait this out.
Nothing to do but let the heat pull the air.
I think you are a fever dream.
I imagine the way cinnamon meets honey,
I feel warm sunlight casting shadows
through tree branches in a cemetery.
Nothing like this ever lasts.
Night Bloom
In the backseat of the car I bloom into witness.
Part of me knows this is slaughter. I watched
smoke emit from my skin as I fixed my hair in
the mirror while I waited in the foyer for you to
pick me up. Your skin glows blue in the eerie light
of the dashboard. The musk of fear mixes with
my perfume in the humid air. Roses and over-ripened
oranges, things beginning to rot. I touch you at the roots.
After, we stand on a bridge over a creek.
You hide your face by kissing me. Your tongue
is dry and mournful. I close my eyes and accept it
into my mouth like a communion wafer.
This is my body, which I have given up, for you.
A Mute
Touch rings through me.
I chime, hollow: a bell.
A golden echo chamber,
I offer up the same stale
answer to any question.
Not a sphynx with coy purrs,
instead an instrument with
a permanent dent. The sound
I make is still jubilant, but my
noise makes others cringe.
Desire is a hot coin burning
purple on my tongue, and its
heat induces me to dumbness,
yet I am still searching for
language to explain this collapse.
Make The Best
To receive is a form of compassion.
You call my body like a suicide hotline
five, six, seven times a day. I want to
call this indignity love, but it insists its
name is hunger. It all feels the same.
Your mouth blossoms into yawn on
the pillow next to mine, and I fight the
urge to stick my finger inside, the way
I used to tease danger, touching the
black rubber flaps of the garbage disposal
with the tines of my mother's silver forks.
I just want to make the beast inside purr,
press metal against grinding. God is the
sticky hands of the two year old down the
street missing his right front tooth. I want
to be angry at your demand but you hold the
door open and I feel myself sliding into the
passenger seat and buckling myself in.
I check my lipstick in the mirror as you lean
across my legs to open the glove compartment,
reassuring me that the pistol
is still there, that it is still loaded.
Night Bus
When you said "good-bye,"
what you meant to say
is "I am empty without your pain."
When I said "until we meet again,"
what I meant to say was
"not until the acid eats though my skin."
This Greyhound Express smells of piss
and barbeque potato chips.
I like to give credit
when it is due
and you may have created this
but really? Fuck you.
I am the original one
who loves these ghouls.
Their little fangs, their gnashing jaws
their hunger belongs to me,
even though you like to say
"sweet darling, I gave them to you."
I cradle these small demons,
rocking them tenderly in the dark.
You gave me enough to feed them with:
I nourish them with your rotted pig's heart.
Alexandra Smyth lives in Brooklyn, NY where she is a receptionist by day and a MFA in Creative Writing candidate at the City College of New York by night. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rufous City Review, The Smoking Poet,Specter Magazine, This Zine Will Change Your Life, and Word Riot, among others.