take that isn’t
a hot take.
My mom
Her phalanx
of textbooks
Her maelstrom
of alpaca yarn
Her bevy of
perfume flew
Into my room
an unkindness
Her desk always
bloated with jewelry
her casserole: vulgar
her Byzantium beet mouth
militia of bared teeth
I miss her
The stink
Her empty
Full
Her wet eye
Her garden of cassowaries
All their necks broken
Grandfather.
I am trying to escape, trying to have a porch and babies, trying to
figure out whether or not it’s polite to ask
If an inch of rain is negligible.
I am mirroring my ex-boyfriend and he’s falling apart
like a pileup of ants. Like a chicken slinking around
like a cat. I believe in the American dream
but not Etsy spells or my slaughtered grandfather.
Once you notice the amount of garbage
on the roadside, there’s no going back. I am not
Ali Baba. I am not Jenny Holzer.
My grandfather doesn’t care about me, but
he sent me a message in the thrum of a titmouse
telling me to do anything I can to regain control
of this situation. For twenty years my grandfather
was a border control officer. On the weekends
He went through litter. He taught me to accumulate
my treasure and my refuse. He kept it in his big chest.
Brita.
The reason I want a boyfriend is to choke him with bees or some purified water
from my Brita or my own throat unchoked
I’m living unchecked and it’s just unhealthy
to hold a pigeon on 79th and Park and bring it
whenever I play some game like soccer or worse
a jellyfish dancing and heartless, brainless, talking
in pidgin somewhere to the boy who I’ll eventually hold
down like he’s curled poster corners, I pour my Brita
the light is as red as my inner ear
Josephine Gawtry is a poet from Southern Virginia. She is currently an MFA candidate at Colorado State University, where she is the recipient of a Gill-Ronda Fellowship and an editorial assistant for Colorado Review. She has work forthcoming in Beaver Magazine.
