UNTITLED ART by Jim Zola
TO EVERY GIRL WHO SEES ME AS HUSH HUSH by Timothy Ojo
this very night, i am mutating my body into a fiddlehead for ghostly pelts. say a ghost is the innuendo to every girl who saw me – as screeching music // oblique photograph of perfection // a faux-oasis in (her) desert // box of wet matchsticks // a dried leaf // a steepy road //
on days like this, i feel like i am bad anxiety. like a shorn skull refracting love that has been encased in your frivolity-coated expression of ‘i want to be with you’ – yet you would rather swallow your lightning-like tongue whenever the minutest of commitment shows up.
let’s say you decide to swallow oxbows at the tributary of your ocean, how do you name the waves that jostle to hug your feet?
and if you hang unto the cities in our minds, how do you decide if either of the cities is a carousel or a pendulum? there are small holes in the words we speak and they always drip in salt & you know it.
i still hear the sounds of your laughter as they make ripples – perhaps, my body only answers to green thunderstorms, because every time i try to gaslight how you sound when you say my name, my voice fades into a sutured incision.
i want to know if these echoes mean oblivion // i want to summon my mind into the deepest parts of narcissism // i want to have a blunt in my mouth while slicing through time with zero memories of you … being an emotional dumpsite has been healthy – see me sprouting toxicity (yay!)
for every time i wake up to a body feeling like a horrible satire – i remember there are flakes of your lies in my skin wanting to know where the sun sets, but because reconciliation is a fanciful sin, would i be willing to be a stranger all over again to your lies?
if closure is a bedevilment, isn’t it just right to become a ritual of pain?
when a boy is broken, you can’t fix him, you can only pick his shards and place them in his fingers & tell him, boy, this sh*t is yours, make out of them lintels & build a coven, for you and you // own that sh*t!
either way, you have set him against the devil – he must decide if he would heal or be a brass tobacco jug ringing every pain into the ears of the next girl who says ‘i want to be with you.’
toxicity can be addictive, or not? haven’t you found out in this poem?
Timothy Ojo is a “Best of the Net 2020” Nominee, he has his works in Street Light Press, Perhappened, BurningJade, Kalahari Review and some others. He was longlisted for the Babishai Niwe Poetry Prize in 2018. He is also an editor with Knights Mind Magazine. He feels blue skies are underrated and pizzas are for the weak.
Jim Zola is a poet and photographer living in North Carolina. His latest books include Monday After the End of the World (available on Amazon), and Erasing Cabeza de Vaca (available for pre-order from Main Street Rag Publishing Company)