Three Poems

 

Erik Fuhrer

 

 

 

 

my own devouring

 

 

your throat a bag of coins toothed up

in a game of roulette that I lapped up

and my teeth are flies biting down

and you are a footbath full of birds

 

the way we speak 

is a symphony of cacti

you slurping the sea 

through a metal straw

as I tongue the gaps of sand set loose

 

the mushroom carrying our cells

has been eaten by a river of birds

purging themselves from the sun

 

as I beak and wing

into the boiled earth

I rush my own body 

like a hand grenade

 

we are the voices that worm 

the air into ears waxed shut with laughter

and I am the blood pressure of the sky

when it is closing

my eyes devouring their own young

 

 

 

 

star eater

 

 

I ring porcelain against my head 

to feel the scarecrow whittle out my ear 

and spit straight in my face as if

I had finally been brave enough to sink my whole face in

 

my hair is falling out slowly like crows’ feet

and I can feel the slow retreat of my body nesting

in its split ends reminding me of the way

I used to wish I had a brain tumor 

it’s a terrible thing to say I know

but I so desperately wished to escape you

 

now paper towels are burning in the toaster

and I feel like this must be what heaven feels like

to be so close to disappearing

 

yes that’s dark but isn’t that what christ did

and he is a galaxy while I am sent to

a quiet room with a white pillow 

and a bracelet that says fall risk

 

see we are all as beautiful as our own first stars

and you ate mine

 

so bury me in the tear of my mouth 

the day you said I didn’t listen

and the next day when my body

and you

and the next day

I don’t have enough tongues to list them all

 

 

 

 

breakable box

 

 

you are a wreck of flowers a gate swung

over your neck like a swan 

accusing me of bleeding in the wrong room

and I am a cooked onion a swollen trip

into the arms of a stranger who rides me into town

like a lawnmower—and I am the glass eye

you swallow when you want to see your liver grow

see, I was always your homegrown garden a plant

that you extinguished your cigarettes in 

and when I wanted to play you broke me like fingernails

scattered them across the highway

called me your little breakable box

and I shut myself inside like a pearl in the cold hard lips of a clam

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Erik Fuhrer is the author of 4 books of poetry, including not human enough for the census (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press).  His 5th collection, in which I take myself hostage, is forthcoming at the end of 2020 from Spuyten Duyvil Press.  Erik Fuhrer is online at Erik-Fuhrer.com.

 

 

 


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