poetry

only room in my bodyfor so much belief not altar nor apparitionbut avarice, but all humanity in a slow slide down. living in an indifferent place i cannot imagine the skyalso governed by neglect. if there is a god, where is the lightning with my name? if there are ghosts,why have none of them come? Cassandra de […]

 everyday we cross     over green water  each step slow and            heavy with stirring  traffic is both ha —    lting and out of breath, here  a suspension nest —    led in the light and  still touching concrete    this walk on the early  hall, each socketed —    morning on our eye —  lids gauze light begins    stubborn opening its  face bit by bit wait […]

I want to love / her accident / her teeth chipped on my name / her body quaked a fidget / tossing witchbones in the cinder / at night we sleep / we wink / we razor-slick the ceiling / board a crossfixed longing / creased with heat / at night she smears my lips […]

Erin Kirsh is queer, Jewish writer and performer living in Vancouver. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been published in The Malahat Review, EVENT, Cosmonauts Avenue, Geist, and The Molotov Cocktail, where she won their Shadow Award for poetry. Visit her at www.erinkirsh.com.

IMAGINE I’M SMALL. IMAGINE I’M SO SMALLYOU COULD POP ME IN YOUR MOUTH & I’D SLEEP UNDER YOUR TONGUE. THINK A CROSS BETWEEN TIC-TACS AND HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS, BUT SEXY. TOGETHER WE’D TALK ABOUT YOUR DAY, ABOUT THE WEATHER. WE’D DREAM OF CAMPFIRES, WHETHER BAGEL BITES ARE REALLY AS GOOD AS WE REMEMBER. IN THIS STORY, I’M SMALL BECAUSE […]

1. The people I know from home meet the people I know from here and I become two different people at once. I code switch mid-sentence. I have spent the last two years speaking in a learned accent. Is my real voice a perfect mix of what I was given and what I have learned? […]

I renounce rice when I am nine, the way one          might renounce Barbie dolls, or multiplicationsheets, or vocabulary quizzes—unpretentious,          without pomp. Baba continues to serve me braised pork belly and tomatoes with egg, eyes soft like          steamed gingered fish, never once picking at thehaggard bones of autumn: how I unearthed dead          silkworms from the garden, or how I would […]

should i learn pythonshould i buy a praying mantis should i start wearing pendants am i a pendant idiot now am i getting the hang of it or being annoying? is it a nail or a needle in my eye andshould i trap the little ghostliving in the weird room in the basement we never go in or talk […]

the sea sun-sick, sun-washed, sun-kissed the sea reckless and in love with the sun the sea with a heart of a fig, a pomegranate, a lemon the sea in the ear of the moon, the sea as the mouth of the moon, the sea vanishing into skins, the sea rebirthing skins, the sea as the […]

I don’t go in. just noticed it in passing, pacing loops on a layover I am an hour’s flight and three hours of waiting from you I’m not one to imagine my own future, don’t build a life of what ifs, if this then that’s. But a chapel in an airport makes me stop Are […]

After Olivia Gatwood I want to feel summer again like a girl like she is standing right next to me breathing hot breath into my ear she whispers like car rides and smells like sweat and is never still, still anything like when I was fourteen and rode my red bicycle to the ocean every […]

So we rent a car & drive to the wild of Pennsylvania. Crops tall as biblical women, their heads flinching. Nobody lives here, it seems. Houses but they’re empty, lights but they’re off. We float to our hotel room & polaroid in the mirror. Swimming pool midnight, chlorine-safe. I couldn’t drown if I tried. We […]

The taste is ritualistic: Peeling off your jacket. Cradling white-fleshed language  like distilled liquor parting father’s cracked lips. Sinking a tooth into grime and hoping to consume what pain has not taken from you. Two fingers jabbed in the jam jar — Maybe I will make a home out of this, you say. You cast […]

On the doors of a church, where the windows run miles into the sky so high that god herself must reach up to open them a notice reads: no poems.  To my religion, I thank you.  Under your tutelage You taught me the way to live In spite of what you expected,  I admire your […]

chicory grows by the roadside, their soft-blunted petals shading blue to purple in mimicry of dawn. i don’t think we ever talked through a sunrise. we came close, maybe, but mostly i remember easing the back door open to stand ankle-deep in melting snow. i remember looking up at wispy pinpricks of starlight, wondering if […]

You tell me how, in his Nobel prize speech, William Faulkner said the only thing worth writing is the human heart in conflict with itself. We are underneath the first tree to jump the gun on Autumn. Holding back October like a yawn, we stay in the park until dusk starts apologizing for the day, […]

cockroach: viscera stew, eyes puddling in the milk your baby cousin vomited yesterday. by sunrise the survivors will scuttle away from the wallowing zongzi, rice gummed golden to your tongue, soybeans kissing the melted flesh of chickens your popo killed herself, hands over hinged neck. your throat curdling as the feathers tattoo the freckled refrigerator; […]

You long for the sea but the city calls you, drunk at 7am. You kiss a girl with a monarch mouth, lips lilac, wings a soft letter. You feel glaring lights on skin, dizzy-tired, wishing hard for the sunset. You watch the towers, tuxedo-taped, choking on their Paco Rabanne. You listen to rain gulping pavements […]

daughter, sister, & friend. A boy. fragmented. Creation of Adam, dropped. A fresco shatter some kind of Picasso. Where there was man there is blank space, turned inward. Nebraskan trailer, I don’t belong here. My mother calls me by a different name, speaking suddenly let’s go see the doctor dear. Tom & John are swell […]

My love, I want to show you this strange moon: a quilted wine and blue, half the charcoal sky– but you are playing a game, a Crash Bandicoot offshoot where you are a humanoid frog who jumps and spins across 3-D landscapes. I ask you please come outside there is a nervous crowd gathering for […]

  I have done my best to wilt, andand everyone around has taken noteand celebratedWhen they look away, I bulge my small pocketswith empty wrappers but if I’m cleverI hide them in the trunk of my car to deal with later.  I never sense when the surgein the pit of my belly will creep up […]

Sometimes I want to tell this city it’s blinded lights faltering bus lines and shining cars right where it can shove it shove off the concrete back to the lakes the creeks even the swamps I grew through Back to the benches and tools rusted at all but the edges To kiss them with my […]

I don’t understandmuch of what youare saying anymorebut I can senseits somehowmore importantthan what you said yesterdayalthough its justmurky somethingsbrushstrokes buried in sand    It’s likethe waywe usedto listento Amy Winehousestoned on theroof in the suncaring less about lyricsthan the motions of her voicecrackling out fromstaticky speakersonto exposed skin You keeptelling meto go backto the citybut I […]

touch that motherly tender love, with your five fingers and giggle out a laugh that will last. a lifetime. save your sister a piece of happiness, do not be greedy. the water is yet to boil and the hands are still open. catch all your dreams before the night shines. tell your father you wished […]

The color of blueberry syrup, stain-lines bleeding through a lifetime of August sunburns: they are angel wings, names of the once-beloved, crosses rising like lighthouses above collarless shirts. In this neighborhood south of the river, they are stories no one asks to hear, painted dot-to-dot with needles, told anyway. When the line to the smoke […]

I don’t want to talk about last night.                                      his smooth hands thick and ugly                         how I loved them I said                                                 I went by your old room and I looked into the window like I always used to.                                 I remember every night we spent there all the clever ways that I convinced […]

—after Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto: “A House so Cramped God Could Barely Squeeze In” the sound of clattering metals                       talks the room into a war ground you hurry into the living room the smoke of yelling clouds the air like dust from horse’s hooves father after […]

New Jersey is a convenience store I hunted for an ATM on an October night. I had avowed to never use heroin again but now I was half-drunk or half-sober The bartender immediately made me for what I was miserable and unconvinced that anyone had an answer or anything to offer to supplement the human […]

your mouth wants to forget the breadth of this place, forget how you rolled into it & swallowed its lynching rains. for what place turns the things in it into ashes. what place burns into the skin & says you’re an embodiment & a reflection of things cracked & squashed. a boy once saw you […]

I blame every Santa Cruz summer for every ounce of invincibility I’ve felt, if you can come out of the thaw still deer spry, if you can swallow the sun like those born here, you can do anything underwater & how many times should I have died but at 16 I didn’t believe in death […]

in cristian’s house there was always clamor the type of place where no deafness of money existed or silence of seclusion like the ocean’s depths and oftentimes we’d sneak up to the top floor where we would fill our pockets with pilfered quarters from his mom’s wardrobe drawer we’d walk along a drainage ditch down […]

I will come hard On the couch Tell me you like it deep That is it for me This salt ache I can hold you in my mouth For the rest of my life if I want to Feel the pressure release quiet Night refrigerator hums cars pass by I have packed the pots and pans […]

When I was still a girl, the boys asked when I’d stop believing in magic. They might ask you one day, too and you’ll have your own words, your own beliefs, your own magic. So all I ask is that you not forget the fish that leapt clear out of the water, the bubble you […]

i. will god let me be a conduit going anywhere i can have you, into elysian fields where i do begin an eager pilgrimage to where your thighs have already started kissing, where i do place my ear to your stomach as a shell to the sea and know the deepest part of you to […]