contains soft* 4 mother’s day 5 sweater 6 lingerie* 7 apology 8 fortune 9 space camp* 10 under my skin 11 the rate of exchange for pennies to thoughts
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puzzle 14 photogenic 15 to my ex’s cat 16
optimist prime 17
soft I wish I were more kind. I wish my heart were made of feathers so that whoever landed there could be cushioned On their way down and out before they leave. If I drink enough lavender tea maybe they’ll be fooled. Cotton candy sweaters and sweet sherbet hair as if to say I’m soft to the touch Touch me, please. As if to disguise that my body is full of teeth.
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mother’s day I used to want a daughter. I thought I could do better somehow. Even in this desolate place I could try to make the best of it— Inhale poison, exhale petals. You can do anything sweetheart, you can be anything. I tried to make it beautiful for her. Spin wooly yarn out of the pain in my body and knit sweaters for all the men who poked and prodded from their white offices. No one should have to be cold, not when you have stars burning in your chest, angel. I used to want a daughter but no amount of strawberry body mist is enough to cover the stench of sulfur. There’s no room for princesses in a place that crowns dragons. 5
sweater this is a brief poem about the dreadful cable knit sweater you dig out of the bargain bin that someone threw away because really what were they thinking with these colors and you take home and soak in fabric softener and perfume simply because it’s so awful you couldn’t imagine leaving it there for someone else who else could understand my ugly the way you do?
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lingerie This one is about the delicate petals of lace on the lingerie you bought at that high-end boutique because you thought it would be perfect because one day someone would want you. You take it home and try it in the mirror. You’re not a woman yet, but lord, you will be. But lace doesn’t cover ugly and No Returns is in all caps on the top of the receipt. Nothing is too beautiful to live its life balled up in a drawer.
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apology sometimes I wonder about where trees go when they’re cut down I can feel their flesh in my seat and in the pencil in my hand but I’d like to know where the nymph sleeping in the bark went and if she can forgive me and if all the poetry in the world makes it okay
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fortune you will take a strange journey far away above the sea behind the stars between the pink galaxies and floating nebula of heaven amid the quiet plintaberry trees that grow beneath the bosom of the universe one desire, she says, is yours to claim and the moment you think of home It’s wasted
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space camp You used to be an astronaut, a little space cadet. You used to have nebula in your eyes and stardust in your lungs that you eagerly exhaled over anyone who would listen to your plans to explore the universe and discover galaxies and planets and life and meaning. But you’d settle for the ocean. You’d be happy to be anywhere dark and vast and uncharted but instead you just settled for me. And sometimes while I listen to you snore at night I wonder about all the stars that should have been named for you. I wonder if they miss you half as much as I would.
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under my skin I had my first kiss to Frank Sinatra and I wish it could have been with you. I ‘d forget if it weren’t for the way you sing slow old love croons out of key to me in your car or for the sepia poster of the Rat Pack above your bed. I said I could swear that the waist of Frank’s pants grew higher and higher each time I saw him. You laughed and told me that’s not how it works but I maintain that if you stare at a memory long enough you can will it to change.
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the rate of exchange for pennies to thoughts a penny for your thoughts you say you offer me a green and brown presidential portrait stamped with the year the Berlin wall fell and a little piece of pocket lint is still attached to the black mystery goop that old money sometimes gets I shrugged and said I used to charge less and your all too excited to advocate for the devil because of how easy and fun it is to have these talks when it’s not your entire life and my thoughts are really only worth seventy-eight hundredths of a cent or sixty-three hundredths of a cent or fifty-four hundredths of a cent to your penny and less than that even when you can discuss pennies over 12
lunch with the vice president and I’m here to run coffee and answer phones and then phones are twenty-five thoughts a minute my rent is eighty thousand thoughts a month and tuition is one million thoughts a year so I’m sorry if it’s too expensive but I can’t afford to just give my thoughts away.
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puzzle I found the last piece of myself rolled up in a gum wrapper under my bed I must have thrown it away in a hurry but I found me and I’m whole now and now I feel all the satisfaction of a newly finished 3,000 pc jigsaw puzzle congratulations you now have a painfully average image of a river or a sunset or something slather me with modge podge and hang me on a wall in your basement or break me up again maybe I’m better off in pieces.
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photogenic for someone who constructs themselves as much as I do I certainly hate to see myself outside of the controlled microcosm of the bathroom mirror and I think that maybe cameras don’t really capture the soul but instead load a recognizable icon for a blur maybe I’m just a blip of static but as long as I never see me I don’t really know
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to my ex’s cat I’ve never missed you but sometimes I do miss your cat and I wonder if she misses me too or wonders where I went I wonder if she thinks of me at all
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optimist prime it was probably a chilly day in November when you realized that your parents aren’t smart people they’re just good people who tried but you wonder maybe if they just let you play in the street with the other kids you would have grown up to be an Emily Blunt instead of an Emily Dickenson or maybe you would have been hit by a semi and died instantly then you wouldn’t have spent your teen years introspecting as if the entire ocean were in your ribcage and maybe you were only so sad because you didn’t know what it was like to be naked and starving and it’s human perseverance to find a way to be miserable no matter what
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and have you ever consideredthat you’re afraid to admit that nothing makes any sense and that you’re just a particle doing its best with what it’s given ping-ponging off the walls of reality like the DVD player logo that yes almost no not quite never touches the corners of the screen no matter how long you watch and you have less than a millisecond to be alive in the scope of space and time and you’re spending it watching the screensaver on the DVD player and writing poetry about how no one is really actually truly bad we’re all good people who got lost all decent particles just trying
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Emi Johnson is a human being, but also a graphic designer who occasionally takes poetry classes
Emi Johnson 2017 Archer Book, 8pt Photo Cred Meena Khalili
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