POPPIES

‘All this jewelry ain’t no use when it’s this dark’

I can smell chlorine through the photo

Everything but the girl’s eden

Sallow tindr pic mouthing a pronoun

Hiding their eyes from I don’t know what

My reflection seems so black and white

I smoke gelato in a raspberry beret

It looks like brutalism, I look so flat-footed

Curves are just beyond my reach

The illusion of control is at the tip of my tongue

How I became one with the invisible

Huffing spirals of emerald below

California’s state flower dreaming of HD

Not what you think it means

Tho it still feels like they’re in the room

Poison of abundance, soft doom

We drifted off to Bardo Pond

A naptime playlist droning from our phone

Where revolution is waiting for the new moon

Slipping into a peignoir, burning your books

I bought a vintage thong and wondered

How much life is left

A SWELLING

We live as if proper names

Could find cosmetic equivalencies

Supersymmetry is a bogus makeup, yes

The word is gigantic, some would say

Hard to miss, bustling and productive

The metropolitan look

This year’s concept album

A block of sullen minimalism

In praise of a manicured idleness

Overclaiming the soft snow

White slumber of dead stars

We kiss and skip over the moon

Its perpetual resurrection is a fairness

Applied liberally in the looking glass

The definition cuts both ways

Heaven is hell squared

A sweetie given a lot of space

I have to make explicit

Implications about what we’re doing

Unaware we push the blush away

To expression’s edge and over it

The mottled proof our embarrassment

It only looks like we didn’t try

When we pinch with a little je ne sais quoi

Ladies pinch

Breaking the skin w/o remorse

I say do we bleed rhetorically

I wonder, really do we?

Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet and editor living in Oakland. They are half-responsible for Elderly, a publishing experiment and hub of ebullience and disgust. They are the author of “Pyramid Song” (above/ground press, 2018), and "Sex Machines" (b l u s h, 2019) as well as the full-length collection Shade (Elis Press, 2015). 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).