Gutter Lover by Ellen Boyette

 

Eaten by a creature of summer,

bummer. In a sec I savor a water

melon jolly rancher. Dancing

tonally livid vapors simmer

around my knee highs and I

press a deer skull in beer.

Rest you must my little purple

finch, cockroach dribble of

gilded inches croaking up

from sick buttercups. You

and I are facts in riptides,

seismic beige the most outrageous

Lascaux with a quinine sky.

Buried vertically she thought

Over my dead bod. You are nodding

off while I scare squirrels and eat

pearls so guess it’s bliss

and should I forget the humming

bird cake, should I forget the neutered

scarves, should I forget the laser

surgery one performed on my

empty apparatus of Dracula teeth,

let me remember your eye sockets

falling across my leather backpack

and asking “is something wet?”

It always soaks up the diversions

into something akin to rhubarb


blood. I’m not hungry for anything

when the apps restrict my cells

from chaotic crushes into ether

and neither are you, neon

yo-yo dog walker ‘cross bog

waters turned pink. In a dream

my cousin was possessed and no

one cared. You, dumb infant,

deceit is perverse like a piercing.

If you reckon then you reverse, curse

A knife wound to dote, remote, corner

of lambs sheered into gutter fluff.

All I need to know is could it be enough

to live in the filth of what made us soft?

Ellen Boyette is a PhD student in English and Creative Writing with a concentration in Film Studies at the University of Georgia.  She received her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first book of poetry, BEDIEVAL, was a finalist at Slope Editions Books, CSU Press, and Inside the Castle. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, Best of the Net nominee, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize recipient. She is the author of two chapbooks and has work featured in Prelude, Action Books online, Poetry Daily, jubilat, poets.org, The Bennington Review, The Columbia Review, Tagvverk, and elsewhere.