Category: Poetry
Visions
by Josie
I keep my eyes open when I look at you. Your lips read: espresso for here, please & my fingertips tap against the plastic screen & I slide it to you with my eyes open. You criss-cross your skin, diagramming the name you’ve owned for years, & before you leave for the corner table, you reach deep into your pockets. I’ve met you before– … Read More Visions
Self Serving
by Josie
I wrote myself some love poems today, outlined in sun near the ocean’s smile. The waves beat down upon charcoal rocks and up frothed a great many minerals. I absorbed them all, flesh-first, like the fern drinks in the rain. I loved myself with pen and with sun; when thirsty, I drank; when hungry, I ate; when sleepy, I slept—and felt no reason … Read More Self Serving
Write Long
by Josie
Be patient, and write long. As long as the strokes of your eye lashes pulse the fingers to keys, then both of us remain alive. Be patient. Your dreams have no anchors; let them float light. Let the throat grow easy and jaw relax. Open and close the hinges of your mouth and feel the knobs of your shoulders merge with the elbows. … Read More Write Long
Step Two
by Josie
Step two : Get small, she said—small as possible you ain’t gonna reach the earth if you insist on being so big. Curl your toes; just like that til you sink neatly in on your center– double, triple, crisp and clean-cut like a paper brochure tuck yourself under and let the head droop.
The Rock and the River
by Josie
At the top of the outcrop I sat with my knee-bones tight to my chest— the river undulated below, swirling in shades of blues and yellows refracted light on stones of marble the guttural current cut the cliff to slices–jagged & twisted and
Sunlight Pages
by Josie
She was a warm-weather writer the sunlight singing into her salted shoulders she tipped her head back and felt the flesh rise, tiny hairs stretching for a soft sky. The pen she held loosely between fingertips knowing it wasn’t for show she was here.
Voices
by Josie
If you scowl, they’ll know. They’ll see into that cave smile and know—if you frown, it’s clear to them, that your mind is a burrito and you are the tortilla, wrapped so endlessly it’d take the sharpest knife to separate that mound. If you let a tear squeeze through they’ll see and gasp and wonder what must have happened to you to make … Read More Voices
Sourdough Soul
by Josie
Don’t ask me to do that. Don’t ask me anything, actually, I’m in deep, deep fermentation & have no flyers to hand out today.
Autonomous Outsiders
by Josie
Praise be the autonomous who sit, crumped upright in a land of red Mountains. The ones who eat, food dripping from loose corners, at a table of stone, who lay, facedown on beds of Earth shards, listening hard for the rare sound
Breathe Your Own Air
by Josie
You wore their hearts on your wrists and ankles belly to belly hugging, chalky and holistic. They extended themselves to you palms sunwards, asking you to see them, to see them, to see them. Your own heart, you tucked carefully out of peripherals, finding happiness in the folds of not having to share everything.
