Two Poems

Preface 

[Redacted] walks through walls. [Redacted] butters her toast on both sides. [Redacted] bleeds bees. [Redacted] calls me collect from the afterlife. [Redacted] takes photographs of [Redacted] in a bed of cotton balls. [Redacted] is a scar on my right elbow. [Redacted] is born on the edge of a cliff. [Redacted] falls off the cliff, except the cliff is a bridge and the fall is a jump. [Redacted] never uses both sides of a Q-tip. [Redacted] vomits linden trees. [Redacted] sells guns at knife fights. [Redacted] is the arm that holds the scar on my right elbow. [Redacted] wears a bullet proof vest to bed. [Redacted] calls me from the afterlife but always hangs up after the third sigh. [Redacted] dances in the street with wings. [Redacted] kills the video that killed the radio star. [Redacted] is born with flowers in her hair, flowers in her breasts, flowers in her kneecaps. [Redacted] bleeds bees. [Redacted] is six feet below your grandmother’s grave. [Redacted] is up in the air, look up and up, [Redacted] is there, popping lost balloons once owned by lonely children.

Poem in the Fall

You came over dressed as medicine. It wasn’t Halloween but it was close enough. You smelled like a color I had yet to discover. I was determined to try though, so I dressed myself as Christopher Columbus, Ponce de Leon, an archeologist in North Dakota, using a toothbrush to wipe the dirt from the crevices of a fossil. Every pill bottle in my cabinet was expired so I swallowed you whole. You recorded your moans and replayed them while we slept. In the morning I promised you’d never have to wonder how I caught mono. We spent the afternoon walking on grapes and drifted into the evening getting drunk off each other’s feet.

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C.J. Miles lives in Iowa with his wife. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Forage, Five 2 One Magazine, Moonglasses Magazine, Unbroken Journal, and Algebra of Owls, among others.

Lead image: “Toast” *with edits* (via Flickr user Josh May)