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.