By Clara Elizabeth
As the cratered husk that is churned out by impermanence and latent greed.
You must taste the floral fringes of this already quickly blooming night
As if you are momentarily mired in enchanting desolation,
Having all but finished fiendishly draining the last lifeblood from the sickly greying dawn.
I will love you fingerlessly,
Swathe you in eremitic reverence,
Allow every precious bleeding stanza to fill me with your fervently impending absence.
It is my most beloved blessing that there is nothing I can hold.
Category: Poetry
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How to touch something good
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Remember this: you’re always drunk at the wheel.
You need to turn the volume up.
There is no one else to give the wheel to.
You must wake yourself up.
Turn the volume up.
Please.
When the moon was halfway down
You didn’t take a fucking walk;
Because just as hard as it is to run with the weight of lead,
It is just as hard to think with gold inside your head.
Now the keys are in the ignition
And a few more glasses of that sweet rum gone.
You are drunk and you are driving;
With our entire aching humanity in your back seat.
Who is the Guru in this silver Audi?There is no one here.
You are almost asleep at the wheel.
The Guru reminds you that you know the way home by heart.
Wake up.
The Guru reminds you that you are drunk and we all could die at any moment.
Please, once again: wake up.
The Guru reminds you that all of humanity depends on your driving tonight.
Darling, again.
The Guru reminds you that we all get home safe as long as you
Wake up.
Now.
Now
NOW!
You must not stop waking up again until we are all home safe.
This may feel like a dream but this is very real.
Who is the Guru on this gauntlet drive?
Who put the keys in your hand?
You did.
We’ve been drunk our entire lives and just now realize we are driving the whole babe of
humanity home in the backseat of this silver Audi.
On two misaligned axels,
Three wheels flat out of four,
With the Guru in your head where
the gold used to be:
Tuning in and out to the melodious static
Ricocheting through mountains,
We make a home in the car that could be our coffin.
The sooner the scenery loses its novelty;
The sooner you realize we are already home,
The sooner we get to stop driving.
Please,
I supplicate:
Do not crash.
I am but a baby in the seat behind you.
Before you know it,
We have been home this whole time.
So again:
Wake up! -
If you are going to dance in the community ballroom
By Clara Elizabeth
If you are going to dance in the community ballroom
To a different tune than the others
Do so with eyes wide
Do not be blinded
While you swing with your known neuroses
Do not have only eyes locked with the delusion of your own
While you waltz
Do not listen solely for your cues and beats
While the orchestra brawls beneath
You must be able to hear the others’ whimpers
While they stumble and halt
Missing choruses entirely
Their dancing is not as gentle as yours
Yet you are still just but half way
Between their dramatic drunken fumbling
And your instructor’s spritely prance
You should not dance so openly in the community ballroom
With meditative abandon
In a clumsy, half-evolved step
Still entrained to old grooves
Unless you feel the function of their drunken funking so intimately
You can twist and swing their jive into yours
Lest others
In inebriation
Read your nimble ecstasy
In their signature of time
And believe your rhythmic ricocheting
To be a tribute to the junkie jump they are stoned on
It is for a similar reason
That it is not good to chant mantra in the washroom
The deafened in the stalls believe you make gossip
They become less likely to taste that they are trapped inside their own mouths
Supplicate to your instructor
Beg to feel their footsteps in the coarse carpet of your mind
Beg to feel their profoundly grooving rhythm by the pumping of your blood
Beg to feel their kind hands pull your waist back to balance after every nauseating,
off-beat spin
Since you seem to be held in the frozen claw of perpetual movement
There may be a chance
The beloved dancing yogi
Will teach out of sweet mercy for all beings
The ballroom mirror winks and smiles with a woeful jig
There is a message for you in your own shimmy
If you are taught to sashay to the beat of your own flighty, shifting breath
In a ballroom blasting booze-bombed loops
Aural Ouroboros anthems
In a key of asynchronously experienced thrills
You must dance with eyes so open and empty
The drunks see through the hollow handle of the soul
To the melodious and enchanting discotheque
Housed in the only warehouse:
The awakened mind of uncontrived open space -
![Lover, for the sake of being clear with you [In conversation with Alice Wirth Gray’s “On a Nineteenth Century Color Lithograph of Red Riding Hood by the Artist J.H.,” from What The Poor Eat (1993)]](https://suspectpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Lover-for-the-sake-of-being-clear-with-you-picture.png)
Lover, for the sake of being clear with you [In conversation with Alice Wirth Gray’s “On a Nineteenth Century Color Lithograph of Red Riding Hood by the Artist J.H.,” from What The Poor Eat (1993)]
By Clara Elizabeth
If we are here constructing narratives
I’m a much better story-teller than you are.
My grandmother was a poet, taught by Langston Hughes.
It was more like this:
I was Little Red Riding-hood
And you the hungry wolf
Except I’m Little Red whose grandmother hung a lithograph of a wolf over the head of
her bed when she was a girl.
So I know all about you and your kind.
See, I knew you would be about
Just by the smell of you:
Sweet, cloying desperation
Starved lust for any skimpy morsel of Purity
Your thrashing greed to be the Animal on top.
I didn’t have to see all the way into those dark, beckoning woods to know that you were
lurking there.
I’m no longer that type of fool.
I lead you all the way to sweet blanketed granny.
Waited for you to mount the bed
And begin moaning with pleasure —
Devouring your sleeping prey
To press the knives of my fingertips into the fragrant blushing skin of your tender,
muscled back.
(If you want to finish someone
By playing into powerlessness, All the power lies in your timing.)
Lover, for the sake of being clear with you,
I will ask you for your response:
Who really is Little Red,
And,
Who is The Teeth?
For you are now little and red against my teeth
In my lipstick
Smeared
And on granny’s now splatter-paint linen sheets
Lush,
Before me
In a funeral bed of your-own-heart soaked quilt.
What you may not know, lover:
The knives on my fingers
(The ones you licked honey off of when I secretly shared my basket of goodies with
you)
Cut both ways.
See, sweet granny’s long been dead
(As, now are you)
And I hardly have the karmic merit in the bank to pay my ferocious bail.
Yet, I hope your getaway in Hell isn’t too much of a drag;
For prison won’t bother me.
Sweet granny was staunch to teach me when I was a girl
That anywhere you go
Is just
A place to go
From the place you are. -
Orpheus,
By Clara Elizabeth
Orpheus,
Why do you move to smoke your cigarette away from me?
I breathe your air regardless–
Every time you touch me it hurts.
The way you move death between your teeth,
I, under your lips and breath and tongue.
If I, your fantasy girl, color the walls of your world, then love, what is it to be me other
than an empty, painted thought?
I will not be extinguished, I swear I exist;
I am your perfect girl,
Sweet fool, that is what I want.
Perfect, is what I want!
It is the I, I want.
It is the I in you that I want.
There,
Your fantasy is mine!
I don’t want you, I want me.
You are me.
You are mine.
I am selfish, I am alive.
Now you have become the empty thought.
I will fight you, my Orphic opponent
Which one of us will win out?
We each claw — not be the figment of the other’s mind.
Lest I remind you: only one of us, sweet dear, can live.
But if I were to die, I would do so happily
Your twisted notion of Platonic form.
You did tell me, I’d look beautiful as a dead girl.
And I smiled when I replied that I would. -
A Scale of Wisdom
By Clara Elizabeth
My Beloved Keeper,
You work early mornings
Return late at night
You are gone for days at a time.
I have created an entire world for myself, in this empty house of Yours.
I have gilded the plaster walls with the ornament and leaf of my thinking mind.
I’ve strung up thoughts like streamers with which I bat and play.
Every time You return to feed me, Holy Light, I yelp and yowl in delighted angst
And climb Your legs in order to be held.
But You arrive to find I have torn up the embroidered chairs in Your absence
And in my manic boredom.
You are peeved,
For You seem like God,
And all I do is Want From You:
Your kitchen is filled with glittering fish,
Their Gem eyes deep enough to take Refuge in.
I whimper and slither dangerously
around Your feet.
If You are generous You drop a scrap,
When You are Loving You drop a whole cut.
Yet, any time I catch so much as a scale from You,
I am so ecstatic to be invited to the feast,
That I dash wildly like the beast I am Kill in jaws,
To gnaw and slobber;
Play with Your gift,
Tinker,
Mull it over,
Display and admire it,
In my graveyard of rotting trophies.
So in my absence You incorrectly believe I am at peace.
When the bones are clean,
Only the proof is left.
You have closed the Door
To my beam and dry-wall Cage.
My God, You are Gone,
I just wanted You,
But only my Toys remain. -
Last Cigarette
By Dakota Dexter
I’m not one to ask too much
But share your cigarette with me
The lucky one turned upside down
That you had hoped to keep
With just a spark, your match in hand
And a glow that lights our eyes
The pain, the rush, the high it gives
Could burn my lungs like yours
We’d bury ourselves in all this ash
A feeling too inevitable to resist
It would grow and grow until it fell
Like silence about to break
The haze that wraps around us
Might hide our honesty
I’ve never liked the smell of smoke
But I think that I could stay
Brisk night air will drive us back
Inside to all the others
In dream or desire, I won’t forget
The taste of your last cigarette
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Field Song
By Dakota Dexter
I want to lay in a field
And let the wind sing to me
A melody that understands
That melts away the world
I would listen as the bugs and bees
Like soft staccato beats
Accent the intoxicating smell
Of the flowers that surround me
I could close my eyes and
Drift into a chorus outside of myself
One that would have me appreciate
The tingling of the grass
The clouds could paint a bridge
That I would not recognize
One that goes and pulls me through
And reminds me this won’t last
I’d hope the sky stays blue forever
But all songs come to an end
So when the rain fell, I’d stay right here
And taste it on my tongue
As a night outro begins
The stars would start to shine
I’d let a tear fall
And wait for the next song
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Our Winter
By Dakota Dexter
Buried under these
Deep winter snows
A moment in time
Shared with you
Locked into place
If only briefly
Our cold troubles
Become one and the same
Foolishly concerned
About season’s change
When the ice is gone
When movement blooms
As winter melts away
Winds turn into sighs
Springs is here
And life must move on
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Walk
By Dakota Dexter
If anything could cure my fear
I think a walk would do
A breeze, the trail, and calming greens
Refreshed feeling anew
If anything could lift my spirit
I think a walk would do
Time to reflect and reaffirm
All that I pursue
If anything could preserve my peace
I think a walk would do
To dwell on things that I love
And those that love me too
If anything could help spread joy
I think a walk would do
I’d be ashamed to hold this in
So I’ll share it all with you
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In and Of Nature
The roots and herbs we just picked are now floating in the rain puddle that has overcome her satchel. I start to run, and she chases. She laughs like a madwoman, hopping over roots, dodging branches. Her bag slaps against her thigh as she runs, sloshing water out as more rain pours in.
Suddenly she stops. She searches, scanning the forest for a recently taken path or the sound of feet against the mud to follow.
I grab her from behind and she shrieks. She shrieks with a pitch so high I fear baby birds may fall from flooded nests, but I can only lose myself to laughter as water splashes from her fists, slapping against my chest in playful aggression.
She settles into me, her baggy jacket a burdensome barrier between us. We begin to dry beneath sheltering leaves as it turns from downpour to drizzle. Sunshine streams in as the clouds move on, and although it is warming, she still shivers.
I lift her eyes to mind, and I kiss her lips still. The forest emerges from the fog surrounding us.
Limbs intertwine like vines, impossible to follow where one begins and one ends.
We are just another pair of plants among the trees, reaching our necks toward the sun. -
It Would Only Take A Minute
It would only take one minute.
You are sitting alone. Alone at the lunch table like you always are. But she is so alive, fire and the bright lightning of a storm.
You could introduce yourself. It would only take a minute.
You could walk over.
A step for each second.
One. Fifty-nine.
Two. Fifty-eight.
Three. Fifty-seven.
Would your feet stutter? Would your hands shake?
Four. Fifty-six.
Five. Fifty-five.
Six. Fifty-four.
Would you trip over your own feet? Would someone bump into you?
Seven. Fifty-three.
Eight. Fifty-two.
Nine. Fifty-one.
Would you lose your nerve and scramble back, hoping nobody saw you?
Ten. Fifty.
You would tap her on the shoulder. You could make a funny joke about the lousy dining hall food, right?
Forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven.
She would laugh, god, you hope she would laugh.
Forty-six, forty-five, forty-four.
What would you say next? You would start to panic
Forty-three, forty-two, forty-one.
God, she is beautiful.
Forty.
Dark hair and bronze skin, deep black eyes and a sharp jaw.
Thirty-nine, thirty-eight, thirty-seven.
But then she would ask you your name, and you would be surprised, because nobody has ever wanted to know before.
Thirty-six, thirty-five, thirty-four.
Luna, you would say, trying to project some confidence into your voice.
Thirty-three, thirty-two, thirty-one.
You would almost forget to ask her name, even though you already know it.
Thirty.
And what’s your name? You’d say, almost too late.
Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven.
Ava, she would say.
Twenty-six, twenty-five, twenty-four.
And it is so beautiful, coming from her mouth.
Twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one.
What else is there to say?
Twenty.
Do you invite her to eat with you? Do you ask her out? Here and now?
Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen.
The thought makes you cower in your own head.
Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen.
But she makes sure you don’t have to worry about that.
Thirteen, twelve, eleven.
Can I join you? She says, looking back at the table you abandoned.
Ten.
Yes. You would say. Yes, of course.
Nine.
Eight.
Seven.
Six.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
It would only take one minute.