Poetry: Selections from Jessie Lifton

Fentanyl Sonnet

You walk two feet and lose your place

On the purple line, your white eyes are sinking

You lonely hunter for a human face

Your hand in mine, forceless, formless shaking

 

Your face, buried in a shroud of leaves

To create new cruelties, beyond words I must

Step and trip. Into hell you make me cleave

Your fur is matted with mud and fentanyl dust

 

The lilac is sick with such disbelief

Your white cat’s face, lies half below

On the purple line, you laugh at my grief

Hell is the highest name of love I know

 

The train must freeze. Be. In a state of speechlessness– Oh. God of ruin

All I have is a lack of motion. Crushed pill, light blue lusting moon. M/30. full of doom.

The Royal Game

 

His eyes track the open window pane

Playing games of chess upon

The cab ceiling’s vinyl grain

Shot of Kodiak to the lung’s crashed Pawn.

 

He drives down Market Square, I-Other

And taps his nicotine stained thumb. 

In single player chess, Blutsbruder,

you can’t ever say you have lost or won. 

 

Hate rumbles the ignition

And his foot is never on the pedal

The Knight takes the Rook’s position

Shadow pacing Battenburg’s stinging nettles

 

He smashes the King. The Rook. The Queen. Turns left and blinker gone

He paces a six by six cell, his shadow’s arms slinking strong.

In a game of single player chess, only a closed fist has ever won.

Waiting for the Man (The Races)

 

I wait

For the man to call. 

To pass the time

I watch them roam

And race forBuckets full of holes

Along the track they tackle

The bird shot off.

All those silver backed racing dogs

Covered in leeches five meters long

Hanging like glue, blue bodies

Releasing such gaseous fumes

Of poppy teeth latched and sucking

Sour milk

Their puppy-dog shoes turned to glue.

 

Here I can turn away from kindness I can

Walk the halls of the grocery store I can

Rub dirt into my thorax I can

Walk the halls of the jungle five football fields long

I can kill eternity

I can walk with no hands

I CAN WALK WITH NO HANDS!

 

Waiting in the dark

White linen pressed to my ear

I hear it all I stare

They cut a hole into my wall

It calls,

Beyond loathing into the 

Bottom of my sole

Let my boneless leg feed

Through my shoe to

The white lined tapeta floor

Let my ligaments fall into the open lure

A dot of shame circling

Faster than I can speak come back

To strangle me.

Back again. The track is set again,

And off the dogs, they scream!

 

I can live

In the black pit that comes.

I can live with droves of other

Animals.

 

We are swallowing five whole parked cars

Into the miasma of decaying greyhound heart

Five whole interstate highways gone to 

The bottom of the bracken dark

Into places with no stars,

Into places where bombs are swallowed up and

Stunned.

 

In my black home

5000 nights of ashen air and no one yet

Has won.

I call for help but

5000 nights and no one yet has come.

 

From inside the hole I knowI’ve found the missing ticket

The dried out Mammoth beside me gnaws

My losing dogs they crowd and caw

Here and listen, listen, hear, hear!

All of our ears tucked back in fear

Everything is better with Xanax and a gun

The air clears

And the race is finally done.

And all my dead dogs have finally won.

And the man with the bag has finally come.

Mother’s Day Poem

 

What is hunger but death?

 

Through empty streets I give chase.

I, ceaseless, you say

My horrible, grinning face

I know only the philosophy of a Bacchic day.

Dizzy with rage.

You say. You must hide your face from

My violence. I say

 

The destruction of the hermai is my

Proving ground.

Marble eyes and bronze ash, your brown breast

I smash

What is hunger but death? Ash.

Ceaseless, ceaseless. Careless. 

You do not stay.

 

I chase. 

I sink ships under cover of night by wildfire and

Let you lie beneath the cover of my love.

Suffocate with delicacy

Close your eyes, 

I control now what breathing means.

Emerge as my calf.

With your rape I sacrifice myself

I decide what creation means. 

I hold the horse head through the desert and territory

Fire. Fire. The gun will not fire. I sow seeds.

What is hunger but death?

What is death but desire?

I cannot speak. I am the creature of the pyre.

Beneath ribbons of violet I am shot in my ankle and my eye.

 

What did lie in your bed before I created you

Flesh from flesh? Shame rests. 

At the altar we will know it, water will cease, and so will breath, and so will hunger, and so will death. Only the horse head will be left.

 

Answer me. Answer me. I beg to speak only the truth!

What is hunger but death?

Jessie Lifton is a writer and college student based out of Chicago, IL. Her work has previously appeared in Apocalypse Confidential, Bizarre Publishing House, and Bruiser Magazine. She can be found on twitter at @jessiechrxst