3 Poems
by Mira Cameron
Sheets
We had a question. Would we need to? They would last.
There was a hole ripping in our favorite sheets, the goldenrod.
We thought we could make do, not wanting to buy sheets for a twin bed when in 11
months we’d end up moving out. But the hole is now a larger hole
growing larger and more are washing through: goldenrod speckled with black ink
and a lake of memory foam. New sheets need to be bought. We no longer had a question so
looked for new yellows to be curious about. You cannot feed infants under one year honey—
perhaps digestive enzymes more likely the stick and weak swallow.
It makes me glad I will never be an infant again but I still want to ball up, wail,
and be cradled. We agree every one year old should be presented with a vial of
honey on their birthday.
Please don’t ask me how I
got honey in my hair.
Fine, I was suckling the bottle to
get the very last drop.
Moving into the smaller room was already a step
toward infancy. You can leave my head. You move
further back, saying, “if starlight would dance on the tips of our fingers, I’m sure we could
make it out of life.” I’m not sure what you’re saying, perhaps a third
of the reason I love you. I see you’re faltering so joke, “when your fingers were in me, I
thought that might be starlight”, then realize that wasn’t a joke.
It was an accurate description of how I felt.
“That wasn’t starlight, it was the sun.”
“The sun is a star.” “Ya, but it’s also why after
billions of years, the earth is still renewed.”
“Probably. True.”
You’re getting philosophical, which makes me emotional,
I can never tell if in a nice way. This is maybe another third of loving you.
I don’t know what the last third is but right now we’re just looking for sheets.
Short note to my loved ones.
In my eulogy, be sure to mention I enjoyed wearing track shorts
on cold days, calling the experience a unique, potently common excitement in life. Tell them
I laid strap when I had a dick and then again without.
That I knew a kid with a rat tail and hurt his feelings asking about it
one day when I bumped into him at the wave pool and recently, I’ve dissolved into
puddles twice, affected by the view; I was happy; it was nice.
Untitled Prose Poem
The April rain, gray wind and sky / bird song choral rafters / preference to
the evergreen. / When the night came for day you took a walk and saw the
witch who drives a minivan pull into her spot / who once snuck up /
will-o-wisp mowing the half-dawn lawn / shaded double figure confident
on the porch of her maroon house of spire and sepia glass / you see her
and you know the world has been an honor. / Half the glory of the snow
have sprouted and half are already / a cold toned royal wander. / You’re
happy for the day you’ve had / but when I play a dissonant note / you know
the tune like a sad cowboy. / It’s a song like a nature vignette snug on a
bookshelf / a sad meal that hits the spot, a spoon and a half of peanut
butter and a glass of water taken to the couch / poetry and the dog,
medicine like love / like an April walk. // Do you think about girls often /
sirens wailing from down the block / mistaking nihilists for optimistic
nihilists / or the therapist’s advice / to shower then coat the body in lotion
to settle down without booze / because writing poems longhand with a
pen made for sketching is a whole other mood when the notebook is
porcelain and you’re on your knees praying anything gets better to the
ambien space / because we know the shower helps like we know it gets
better / there’s psych pop and the nurturing repetition of the red-white
rabbits in Ocean’s tub / the robin and the honey locust and everything you
said good morning to and everything you wanted to before / you became
quiet into a veiled sky, crescent moon shining unfinished business. No. /
We are lonely. / The plane and its headlights fly on and the moon is just
sun dulled casting off; not a ghost / The ground is wet. The dog scratches
the door, asking to go back inside. / We were looking for a message. You
hallucinate a toy poodle as I give my dog his vitamins / its necrotic body
breaking off then vaporizing / he is happy to see us / our agitating
confessional perception / made of gone and forth dialogue:
self-implicating the others though truly wanting harmony / a conversation,
not tell all and wonder what we can hide in the same brain. / We will never
not be this way: an ensemble of peers raised by the foreconscious
remembering how to be itself / studying what’s okay or makes sense,
patterns that never merge / and patterns that do / tracking voices that
stimulate emotion and treading a way to the end / hid but not forgotten,
found by an adoring touch / I have no names / though I haven’t directly
asked them // where we are: / we’ve occasionally considered it.
Mira Cameron is like a twink and a dyke had an extremely sensual baby; like if Lorelai Gilmore was a surrealist who loved dancing in her backyard, but the backyard was a serene rural landscape. Their poems can be found in Anti-Heroin Chic, Corvus Review, and Boats Against the Current, and a chapbook-length sequence is at Slippage Lit. You can stumble into them by accident walking around Chicago or find them @nonsensetheimp on Twitter.