Isabella Willms-Jones
Passing
they are watching their
blue movies with the curtains
thrown open
waiting for me to point and
say look i have that plant it
looks better at my house
i did my best i
thought i did i wish
i was the kind of person
who believes the moon can
do things then i would
say it was that and it wouldn’t
have to be me and how i came
out so crooked
i only meet the feeling as it’s
passing like eyes in the back of
someone’s head
i don’t think i ever told you it’s
just pictures up there nothing else
and sadly you were never in them
sometimes me on the victoria line
clutching a raceless baby
sometimes stage lights burning my eyes
sometimes wet revenge with a ball-peen hammer
at joachim’s house there is nothing blue
just the lace curtains and the cows at the front
our house was the same once, all piled
under one roof sharing pathogens like
interspecies anecdotes
back when your people and my people
might have been on the same boat
or wiping dewdrops from the backs of their hands
in the same fields
now we’re here,
doing all this to each other
LOOKALIKE
did my body fold to meet you?
did you know it was just for me
did i tell you i never knew my
teeth were yellow until i moved
to america
did everything end where
my flesh shifted into floorboards?
she says her body is not
political clutching a drink at
a weird bar with too many
quasi-teenagers that i am
technically still part of
when i stop pretending
there is an ache in the
back of my knee standing
so long at this bar
which is the throat of my knee
in german
the jugular an unseen
vulnerability
men used to grab that
spot in bed i would
think i am a plum
they will see my darkness
i am being split open
that was not politics no
gears and mechanics of
my cracking joints
to chill the moment
my great-great-grandmother
has been taking a state-sanctioned
nap at butovo since 1937 with
20000 of her dearest friends
that bone salad feels
middlingly like something
like her eyebrows on my face
a near century later
Thank You!
maybe i want to be loved
and then left at a restaurant
just so when she leaves i can order the full
menu front to back and eat until the
brunchers leave for lunchers to come
for the sun to set for shifts to change
for the dinnerers to settle in the
birthdayhavers to arrive
i will be hunched over
plate 48 shoveling heat into a bottomless
pit perched on the edge of my chair
ignoring the bill chewing swallowing
salty until it turns sweet until every tastebud
has been rubbed raw
and she might text about getting the rest
of her stuff but they are putting up chairs
and my phone has long gone dark
and i am still hungry
Isabella Willms-Jones is a Creole-German writer based in Philadelphia. Her work has previously been published by MiddleWestern Voice, Hot Pink Magazine, G*Mob Mag, Silver Operation, Exquisites, and Bullshit Lit. Find her on Instagram @bellaivanawj.