Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Jamie Townsend : Two poems

 


TRYING TO BE AN OCCASION IN A STORM
(After kari edwards)


My sex was barren as a cave the world cannot find its way inside

I sleep on the ground and imagine things more real than dirt

I was an event most were mostly interested in

You can’t really escape the church yet

To survive means goodbye ‘healthy relationships’

Hello besties listening to the dark center of the universe


In the dark, under the covers I might

Disintegrate into the thin air, if you like

We read Genesis, a list poem, head on a lazy susan

Swerving like an atom in descent

Slip your hands beneath my dress

Soft as a feather stiff as a board

Object speaks on special occasion

A quality impossible to translate

Hell in a knockoff handbag

A prime example

Dangerous as a triangle

We keep our eyes on the angel

The reversing horizon

Bubbles piling on a thin skin of milk

Obviously courting a sense of breezy repentance

The threat you might be a fairy

And me lost in Fairyland

That I could trace the map of your torso at will


Birth a spiritualism of bacteria


Our blood’s hot air meeting a cold front


Holiday in the high prairie, gateless and barren as sex


The snow is sideways and you’re going super fast

 

 

MASH NOTE


‘Bless you’ I write to myself

From the inside out

Notes swarm through the air


Now I want to be your dog

A frozen thought, a rainbow


Orbiting the sun


She’s so high


She stretches into an I

Tiresias in the sky


Where diamonds aren’t

A girl’s best friend

 


 

Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet and editor living in Oakland. They are the author of 6 chapbooks as well as the long-form collections Shade (Elis Press, 2015) and Sex Machines (speCt!, 2020). They are also the editor of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat, 2019) and Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk (Jet Tone, 2019). With Nick DeBoer they curate Elderly.

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