Three Poems
Parker Tettleton
Like A Weighing Area
When things are pretty, I want to destroy. I tell Noelle Noelle-things; she’s a coworker & this is the second sentence & I’ve only slept as much as I’m allowed to sleep when I miss—I miss again, but I pick up, I hear from the you I miss—I flick light switches sitting in front of fans. The graceful thing is cell phones last longer. I don’t want to ever say you’re up again.
Button
I have a thing for kissing people’s brains. When I was eleven or so years past the beginning of myself, I watched James Bond & mouthed pillows in hotel rooms. I was most attracted to belly buttons. I check out the last people, a mother & a daughter, five after four, which is to say we were closed five minutes ago. I’m waiting on the 12, Alee’s waiting on the 20. We’re talking about our lives—no, we’re not talking about anything, which is on purpose, which is coworker to coworker, & I know there’s a bus in five minutes to take me closer to my apartment, to tomorrow, to you.
Goodell
I look up, awake, slowly & intentionally never, not gracefully—grace is searching for itself, not on a cobbled step in some fever dream tower—there is a blink. R calls & says he & R will be here in ten minutes. I am in the bathroom, I am in the kitchen, I am switching cans. Houston does the splits. I almost help them but I don’t. BB King is dead. This is about falling apart.
Parker Tettleton is a Leo and a vegan and a resident of Portland, Oregon. He is also the author of the grocery-shopping-themed collection GREENS (Thunderclap Press, 2012) and the chapbooks SAME OPPOSITE (Thunderclap Press, 2010) and OURS MINE YOURS (Pity Milk Press, 2014). Parker Tettleton is online at http://parker-augustlight.blogspot.com.
