Sticky Territory. by Ash Turner


    1.   In the window seat, there’s a boy ten years older than me
          spouting off predications like, We’ll live till 123, easily

          So it seems I’m having difficulty slipping out of habitual tease.


          O, the bitching and whining of post-post-ism living.
          O, the cardinal tellings of stress-dreamt falling.

    2.   With a body fit for origami, I fear no shape.
          So I can consume for you all things.

          Full-roast, full-body,
          I grind my teeth on yours
          on top of mine, starving. . .

    3.   I am a flesh sack. Direct attentions seem
          suspect, even alien in this dialect.

          Where are the strangers fucking their feels
          and funding its conceal?

    4.   I am begging now,
          allow this entry into my lower cavity.

          Excavate the zones within me that condone this sticky territory.

          Craft a lexicon of curve and masochistic urge: that self-destructive
          touch; volcanic vulgar smut; inevitable and-then-what crux.

    5.   I want to know what makes you nervous.

          Where is that happy median between being outside yourself
          when giving & receiving pleasure and being so in yourself
          it’s like there’s no connection?

    6.   Swallow self-harming and body-monitoring as a women’s panopticon
          towering.

    7.   Sometimes I’m just not home

    8.   Mid-Flight Confessional: My preferred end would be a plane crash,
          an abstract mess.

          Synapse snap, chaos cut to cacophonous thud, then dull dull hum.

    9.   O, what pure elation—this reprehensible apprehension, a sort of
          this-that tension. . .

          An ostensibly cyclic limit to which your heart flips acrobatic.

  10.   And so what if we’re buzzing and mad like Tesla’s hopeless
          interstellar love fad?

          It was just sex,
          is just sex.

          He knows how we’ll spin this:

          Drowned out ground.
          Post no bliss.


Ash Turner is a New York City-based writer and collaborator involved in interdisciplinary art-making. She holds a BA in English and Music from Florida State University, where she focused her studies on hybrid genres, hypertexts, and composition/revision techniques. Her poetry has been published in the Lost Country and Contraposition Magazine, and is forthcoming in MUSH/MUM. Follow her @aturnerwrites and ashleyturner.info.