Jamie Townsend
From Our Hearts to Yours
At first he was a character
He was gay and confused at the expectations
In the film too young to die when he was younger and working out
A future Health Ledger would paint on these polaroids with nail polish
He was sort of framing his golden reflection in a pool
Of milk and become something beautiful like an illusion
Crawling inside his skin to release the tension of being alone
Drifting in a rancher’s tan and denim beneath the big sky
Where the rings of Uranus chime like the prayer of a saint in a pit
Just swaying as the surface bends then breaks
As we sway almost mindless to his liturgy
Padding
imagining everyone without their clothes
is not as socialist as one may think
there’s something luminous about
the falsity in expectation
the music fades out and the lights dimmed
there’s no need
to determine where each of us overlaps
spray-on tan
pancake factor
on a piece of white paper
we drew a garbage can to hide in
tapped our skull until the cosmetic became
synesthesia
chapstick icestorm
pushed and pulled on the thin slipperiness
for pleasure
mica crushed against our angles
Supersymmetry
The fruit bowl is empty so we sleep in
The retrograde glow of one’s friends to be
I teased a wet dream about the universe
That oscillates so no worries about completion
I was mad at the certainty, the Big Bang
Baroque hunting scenes, the idea of being Rubenesque
That’s blushing all over a soft swole
Fleshy, connecting the dots to form something empty in the middle
The object of this voyeur whose gaze had strayed
For a moment we called it lovely as an arrangement of produce
Ham, jonquils, heavy scrotum of hosiery and pearls
The romance of mishearing
‘Kiss a sunset pink,’ non-toxic manicure
Julian suggests ‘a cricket on a heap of trash’
Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet and editor living in Oakland. They are half-responsible for Elderly, a publishing experiment and hub of ebullience and disgust. They are the author of several chapbooks including, most recently, “Pyramid Song” (above/ground press, 2018), as well as the full-length collection Shade (Elis Press, 2015). An essay on the history and influence of the literary magazine Soup was published in The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books, 2017). They are the editor of "Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader" (Nightboat, 2019) and "Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk" (Jet Tone, 2019).