Dumpster Deities
Kan L.
For those i love, may the word cease to tear you down.
Silver Wing and Tongue Once upon a time, a witch loved an angel with hollow limbs and needlepoint feathers. Once upon a time, the witch would have tried to survive on only angel kisses, and wrote charms into poems and enchanted their lips so every word of love rang true. Perhaps, then, it was for that reason when the wings tightened around their arms that the magic slowed. Perhaps, then, when the angel demanded more enchanted words, more charmed stories, it was for that reason the witch turned their head away in face of the angel’s wrath. Once upon a time, a witch loved an angel with hollow limbs and needlepoint feathers, and together they crashed to earth.
Quiet Blessings 1.
2.
When the universe was still young, all the stardust and all the light looked to each other and as one decided to condense all their glory into one, single being. Now you sit in summer grass, look into the sky as though you could fall off the face of your earth and I can see you wonder how lucky you could possibly be to see such a sight. Grass pricks the pads of our feet, mud pressing between our toes and song between our teeth. Your fingertips are my prayer beads, and you, a god given gift.
Dionosydian Today he lives in a child, kind of heart but/ lonely of soul. Today he lives/ in the bottles of rum at the boy’s feet,/ the margarita in the girl’s hand/ the stolen liquor that lives in the backseat of/ every sad kid’s car, as though/ his wine is no longer blessed, making temples of/ lost bodies and hands that wish only/ for another’s to hold.
It hurts to grow...
...But nothing will change if I don’t.
Junk Angel Some cigarette held tight between sheetrock lips/ something bitter grasped loosely between carnelian fingers/ oil spills create a halo around his feet, some/ mockery of the holy but even his wings/ cobbled together from rust and regret/ still reek of desperation for heaven.
Golden Years Cherry red front porch steps and drowsingly sweet lavender wine, do you remember our pudgy feet buried in wet grass and our fingers stained with soil? There is softness in being kind and nothing kinder than that softness, and oh how soft we were then. If there is a god then please, give me back seven years old, give me back sticky ice cream days and milky vanilla nights. If there is a god then please, give me back cicada whirrs and firecrackers at dusk, I am afraid I may forget.
Temple â—?
â—?
â—?
No god has looked upon our bones and seen a place of worship. No spirit would settle in our bloodstreams or under our fingernails, no divine being has seen the gasoline dogging our footsteps and said yes, yes, this is what will remember me. And yet, something still calls this body home. Walls are draped in the fabrics the temple has chosen, the offerings at the altar soda and sweet sour candy swallowed into the slowly healing ground, every brick pockmarked and scarred but painted with every image this temple would represent. We are nothing if not vain, we are nothing if not sacred. We, so wonderfully mortal, we, so terribly fragile, have we not deserved by now the right to look at our hands and see something worth building our lives with?
Apocalyptic Three hours after the apocalypse, silver trumpets lay strewn and bent over the ground and I sit crossed-legged on what was the roof of my home. The sky glares down at me, starless black yet burning bright, the once poison air outlining my bones and my blood and I am fire, I am fire, I have survived. A small, wrinkled wild buttercup struggles beneath its grave of soot and ash, turning it’s weak petals to the darkened sun. I have survived you, and I am all the more tender for it.
Kan is a queer poet with very little patience for liars. They find the world fascinating, from gods to garbage, and hope that you will find a little bit of that wonder between these pages.