Violet Spurlock
you could be / if you were anyone
noticing Arcadia absence implying
your general whininess & quiet
capacity straining like a reed
bleating across data cables
from Berlin to overly hyped
city with no difference / city of vagary
where nobody Facebooks the fire
against all advice in a pretense
of civic service / gifting a deathwish
nobody gets off like mild enemies
while the real simulation fortifies
cross-taxi flirtation makes current
mistakes continuous with former novelty
whose body relation explains sizing
synthetics revealing organics
my workaround fantasy is spiritual
in the sense that I haven’t tried it
Mom listicle bleeding into
the absorption limit surpassed
dream creep same as the real creep
just the face has more details
when comparison itself pales
anything panting’s a pussy / happy
what’s cleaned is not cleansed
I think that’s right
like it’s not wrong
to laugh and just repeat the fun words
if we lived in poems
we’d never watch TV
well, we would, but with an audience
watching us trying to be an audience
awkward to have a record
of aimless spirals’ varying degrees of casualness
some days nothing crystallizes
until you see an overpriced chicken
something inside you finally feels instinctual
says it should be $5
your stomach says $5
not the chicken
and a living cat moves while I sit still
neither of us are off to the cult party summer camp
it’s fall and we’re sober free thinkers
who mostly think time is fake but death is scary
and an illusion which writes poems
is a phantom I must protect
tasked with such
I lived but did not see
this was fine with God
who smiled and said ‘more for me!’
glitter rock shows the little light
my dress also reflects, but you want less
around & on me, I guess that’s you
puffing up the absence you carry
dogged hesitancy helps us find space
in the gaseous caverns of a bloated blank
to act out and talk about
hand-me-down fantasies from free and dying cities
it helps to have something real in your mouth
this variably-named junk which drags us around
but things do become impossible
to become possible again
differently, things,
which I love for their weighty vagueness
like the cloud my poems don’t live in
thin rush of mutualism
in little gem valley
is it unforgivably imperious
to laugh off offered lust?
I accept it without being molded
I try on the limit and mourn it
my subtle middle
hardly quivers for tops or bottoms
but my inside tingles and that’s sensible
if you’re looking at my insides
with eyes of haptic pressure
you’re getting me somewhere
FLEXING THRU BEDTIME / CHILLING WITH THE CHOSEN ONES
dream that my knowledge fosters illicit erotics
my life is basically three data points
what’s good becomes paltry
bro communication, or no questions
I’ve arrived at my own delusion
it faces me alone in multiplicity
like clouds deforming
delayed promised rain
I’m sorry I couldn’t say ten simple words
what it takes to text you back
I don’t know how energy is shaped
the slot machine consciousness
blank but colorful, how the surface
declares its own insufficiency
unless you’re in a money dream
and I forget if I am
trouble is, some things you want
but you don’t wanna buy them
titties being the obvious example
trouble is, you can buy them
so just focus on smells and whatever else
scientists are ignoring or haven’t yet
successfully disrupted instead of
pain and hunger
sorry scientists, I’m not going to
disambiguate you from capitalists
given the smallness of my life
I have accepted anecdotal evidence
as a valid guide for my stumblings
as we accept that men are allowed to politely
be rude to a woman who is not sexually available
and some women never are
though we might wonder what special erotics
thrive in the gap
I was hanging out in there and it got pretty weird
I would have fucked just about anyone
who was specifically myself
then I narrowed a few walls
but didn’t incorporate belligerence
into my sex life, it always seemed
cartoonish when I wanted to feel real
not like a person but a real animal
that likes lots of green around
when it’s digging or being dug
in things that are only warm and wet
I remember ends of trails or times
of slowdown squeezed in
and my life was not transformed
to revolve around this bliss
despite that real possibility
it felt like tapping the dome
would only scare the inhabitants
I had seen people go crazy
one has to do what others do
but this is hardly noticeable
as long as often enough
you get to bare yourself
to another, the ocean, or both
Violet Spurlock is a writer living in the Bay Area. She is the author of Alloyed Bliss (Eyelet, 2021) and VS VS VS (GaussPDF, 2021). Her first full-length book, In Lieu of Solutions, received the Other Futures Award and is forthcoming from Futurepoem.