TO BE THE LAST PISTOL EVER FIRED
Or the one cow in a body bag
stuffed with much smaller creatures.
To be the wet marvelousness
shouting secrets at the snow, or the string
of floss threaded through the left ear,
out the right. Or the gelatin of your own love
gushing down the drain, your dumb hands
grabbing after its tail. To be the nebula a star can’t
wean itself off of. The final layer of shale before the oldest
birch fossil. The wimpiest clump of atoms in the room.
To be frightening as a flying sperm whale. As
the empty birdfeeder. And no more tender
than a fishhook through the tongue. Or a kiss
from a loved one in a dream you forget. O,
to be so hazy and so sought. To be the wind
dancing between the teeth. To be those smaller creatures:
the cockroaches, the dumpster mice, the axolotls. To be the spider’s pride
stretching across a room, mute and nearly invisible,
except for the moments when light
rides along the filament. To be that:
a singular path forged by your body.
To be your body. To not be the gunpowder
but the giftwrap it wears. To be that.
To be that.
THE BLUE INFORMATION
There are planes & clods of dirt in my hair & a bad feeling about, like when everyone is on
mushrooms and somebody gets up to leave. The pharmacy tech produces
her harpoon gun, punctures my plumping thighs. Thank you curtly. Now I am off
on a date with the moon-inventing girl. She unfolds schematics over her
head, chatters about prototypes, government grants. My heart un-nests, becomes a hollower
egg. I use red words like inspiration, mournful. Secretly I beg to relate
to that kind of innate kindness, to see the world at its darkest and want not to
return to the light, to hoard it, but bring it right back there, where it’s needed. More
silently still I wish to be needed like that like light. At home
I stand in front of the mirror in a blazer and bra, pout like the people on
Instagram I don’t know but still love, like they were botanists & I difficult seed.
How to say this:
I want my body to take a fucking hint. To be a skeleton
key and a god damn good one. Meet every season with just the right bend,
the proper stretch mark. For the dead bugs in my cereal to, please,
float to the top. Meanwhile the blue information still getting all swirled up
by the sluttish little whorls of swallow’s wings. And life is like this.
Washing your hair. Maxing out credit cards. Letting the morning pass by
unanswered. It repeats. It repeats.
I step out of the shower without rinsing my conditioner.
I pull up to the Walgreen’s window and shout
into the speaker’s mouth: estradiol pleeeease.
Ashe Prevett (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Still, No Grace (Madhouse Press, 2021), which received the 2020 Madhouse Editors’ Prize and a 2022 Georgia Author of the Year Award from the Georgia Writers Association. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as West Branch, Sixth Finch, Colorado Review, and others. She earned her MFA from Georgia State University.