Sophia Dahlin
Purchases
sweetheart please clamor, I am 100 aroused ears
quivering as if dispersed across a field
and I feel my foliage enlarging
rambling skyward in listening rhapsodic
eyes sliding neatly into the corner
where the sweetheart perches, daintily
visible, as fraught
as rain upon my fleshy area
or like we’re in a cave, I wrote café
when the rain nips patrons from the sidewalk in
but I mean like we ranged on vacant rock
not knowing rain other than drips
you purge from stalactite
to stalagmite pointing ends
if I wrote tip it wd unfortunately rhyme
babeface leaf through me ungently as the researcher
who fears not library fines, bunch
my pages to extract
any info you could use
I mean to be mobile, I mean to rise startlingly
with your bouncing hand, no I mean to lie shudderingly
like stalks of waiting listeners and weeds
or be a brown bird gnarly in the sun
Broke Up
I give up my lizard
yeah
go find heat buddy
I live in a bank
it’s all like “water” I’m like “ca$h”
dammit $$$ so I don’t sun
nor are there rocks to be upon
I have bosses
have bosses have
pulled through by noses
I’m a dry fish is how I met the lizard
yes lizard in the day’s heat
pulsed and shone
and I was like “water”
“water” the bank said “$$$$$$”
my nose was like “yes”
the liz was “what is it?”
I was alive to the emotion
I knew my breath was being held
liz goes
for me it has melted
all my lucre goes
teeter-totter on a scale
Did It Hurt Tho
the sun is out for good
the snow is halving
half of my heart is homeland
half is mustard
I make the most of it
normal and blooming
all yellow's best
you say
I knew for once
things that my heart could do
not follow a bus
or turn over in hand
my heart
waits until floating
that's the manna of it
manna's out in the sun
falls from the sky
like you did
like you did
before you were mine
Sophia Dahlin is a poet in Oakland, but she was a poet in Philadelphia. Her first full length collection, Natch, is now out from City Lights Books.