perhaps in my next life: 2 poems
Kelsey Britt
the movement of our bodies had rubbed the edges of my right knee completely raw.
the movement of our bodies had rubbed the edges of my right knee completely raw.
I want you to see this as romantic
A unneutered preteen breeze / loiters around the trees / this morning.
I am no longer interested in the world and know that it is not interested in me.
We started off as strangers,
you and I.
And I’ll always wonder -
if there had been others
would I have picked you?
Your brothers were already gone
by the time I got there
so I paid for
Me sitting down before a cheesecake factory menu
and seeing only letters.
Me fucking without even a hair as much the enjoyment
I get from a waffle--
In my earliest memories, I am building tall towers out of indigo blue picture books
Because cigarettes are one thing,
but my baby won’t have me smelling of shame.
I did not raise my glass in toast to the passing of Gene Hackman.
The glass always refilling / and fracturing his life
I have been waiting to become a better writer so that I can understand them.
The first shall be last and the last shall be first, Frank said / that’s from episode 42 /
of the telly series Kung Fu, / ‘This Valley Has Terror’
Sex is the opposite of being a novelist, and I would rather live between them.
But there’s no cup, no / kitchen. Just one mouldy / statue, dreaming of television.
out in the Everglades, no resurrection
just a rotting boy's corpse
Love is like a museum. You have to look around, experience things, and then leave.
"[Her Lesser Work] is a collection of mordant and formally inventive stories circling themes of, let’s say, desire and escape within repressive structures."
-Walker Caplan, Literary Hub