PAULA MENDOZA

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Surfeit. In lien. Misered surmise. Longed for after fall. In midst of wintering. Balkan and gavel. Lorded then droll. Ascertain a certain slat. A laughing matter. Materialize set and rise. Inseam, inveigle. Opulent corpus deluxe. Lucid city. Swim of lights. Magenta, viridian. Cop to it. Co-authored. Scintilla. Own accord. Askance adieu. See to her. Attend Antigone. Anti-gone. Ante-up. Does it pine, molt, or turn. Feral. Leveled again. Stent. Maybe patched. Bald tire. Faced and looted. Lyre, strum, and pluck. Picks. Selenium. Argon. Desultory. Floored, moored then tethered. Demur. Flask, absentia. Wormhole. Held up. Empty register. Word choice. Trochaic island parasol. Colorado peripheral. Horse or ass. Change stream. Train dilemma. Save the one, always.

Stop Me If You've Heard

Everything I write is the end but I want something more than smog and a shitty poem about drowning in floodwater. When it gets under the skin like an implant you pick at screaming into your arm you can't have it and I won't let you. It isn't paranoia it's a scab and a swarm of hornets trembling the shape of a valentine heart. It's when I met you I knew it wasn't gum I'd stepped on. You can come inside my vortex but only if you clean up after. I briefly considered going girlfriend after a night pounded jelly-kneed fetal on the floor. He thinks he knows, better each day, but I turn. Like milk. Like medieval breaking wheel. Like coat. Like knock. Like down. Like over in my grave. What's there to say but next. Who's left to kiss, to leave, or on first, or beside the building boarded up and tagged with scripture. There are two types of poet, it goes. And there's the mistake you think you're making new but it's the same name different hole. The same gore different axe. The same smoke different gun. It really goes. Off, faster than I got there, a pool of ripped cotton around my ankles. Do you know? Where you're going to? Do you like the things that life is showing you? Maybe if I were less of more of the same. Maybe if you were—onetwothreefourfive   sixseveneightnightten    eeeeleven   twe-eh-eh-eh-eh-elve. Please god don't let me write another reason why I am afraid we fucked it all up and good. Please god I am so bad at dystopia like what is aftermath of decline even. Nothing adds up except neglect. No one really believes you when you say I meant it when I said ______.

Spell

after antarctica and before the viscose  ::  in between heart's atria and chamber music  ::  a paltry offering when you took what you could get  ::  forces unseen rhubarbed the crenellations  ::  the note read ship her back to mother  ::  when i am not around bad things happen  ::  a hero like captain planet’s mullet  ::  i am taking the pie with me  ::  i unsubtle it  ::  some mornings abacus and other nights veruschka in the bed on fire  ::  tinder even if shivered leafless  ::  forsythia for instance  ::  in my net are pneuma i pin onto tiny sateen pillows  ::  iridesce your dead  ::  commandment after commandment trembles my little chisel  ::  shattered the slab  ::  i can be forgetting the low hanging misticles  ::  salamandrine or begotten  ::  i shimmy onto my hind hooves come time to be stood  ::  end to end and into eating my tail  ::  haberdasher her kremlin siam  ::  chortle your knockwurst and slut it for the creamdom  ::  helsinki gone down singing megadeath  ::  mourners hum accompaniment  ::  mostly free jazz and coke jingles  ::  teach it to sing and feed it full of murrka  ::  man's business is mastery

Never Ever Use The Word Juices

Most people isn't anyone you know.
Truth is everything I take off's a lie.
What's dead on the inside still moans
with her eyes closed because she knows
you're watching. Experience blunts
the effect of you're so beautiful.
Did you read that in a book somewhere?
I read a book once, somewhere. You need
to stop saying beautiful like I haven't
read it before. Somewhere. Most of me isn't
anyone you know. I am telling you the truth
when I tell you where to put it. And the truth is:
somewhere. I mean, there. Yes. Right. There.
I'm fine are you fine yes we're fine ok fine.
Look: I just need you—to listen—to instructions.

Sentimental Poem

That one Christmas we got each other a DVD of Under the Skin in which Scarlett Johansson is a serial killer alien harvesting the viscera of lonely men. It moved you. It terrified and depressed me. We were both moved is the thing. The day after we saw it in the theatre I wrote a mediocre poem about how the body you live in can be broken into. Days after we watched another about a girl looking for a briefcase of money. Each scene steeped in grey and blue, every still were all the hues that meant cold, alone. You were comforted to see one kind of loneliness reflected back. Her hunt put me in a funk for weeks. I believed I was her and saw the poem was a fiction like money or murder. I went looking for it in inclement weather. If I’m being honest, romantic comedies are my jam. Calling things your jam is something the kids say these days. I note this for authenticity. Which isn't being honest but rather being true to the performance. A week after Christmas one of us returned the movie because we only needed the one copy. We were being practical which is romantic. We were true to form like a joke that kills. Not two but one we would never need cut in half. The months ahead were underwater, grey and blue. A year or two ahead, there’s the one copy you’ve kept, and we are still two, you over there, me over here. And again, cold around the bend. And cold buried the girl who embroidered a map marking red what I and you seek. And we are each our own moldering maps. Folds and illegible roads fused and flaking, accrual of so much in between. There's the gift I will give you and you will give me which neither of us will need. There's a briefcase of cash or a gutter of innards or Scarlett Johansson naked, which both of us appreciate, having an eye for exquisite lines.

When Skies Are Grey

Between’s the murk.
What warmth we scavenge:
perishable as any body.

Know a fuck’s
elision, not liaison.

Not:     mon‿ami           mon‿amour
But:     l’homme             aujord’hui
Do not mistake me.

Day’s only tilt
and spin abstracted.
What the sun does

we will call morning.
What it doesn’t, night.

Narrative Poem

I want to go back in time but not like inside a plot where the heroine is triggered by the sight of a blue coat and the killer's face draws out of shadow so everyone knows it was him all along. How her vision dissolves backwards, periphery narrowing its aperture to sketch in the folds, the gestures, the damning scene. There needn't be a body, no chambers emptied of shells, no curl of smoke or blood snaking under the door. No one ever has to leave and refuse to turn around while someone else stands in the rain and watches them walk away. I don’t want to go back in time to cohere or arc elsewise. What I have in mind’s in mind, like in that film where the lovers consent to the removal of all neural trace of their love, effectively rendering each other as never having happened. A future-perfect tense as preventive procedure. I will not have known you. So, not like entering into then with now’s dimension-crossing machine, where one navigates knots in the endless rope of time, all of which mistakes sequence for story. As if one ever had to do with the other. No, I mean—a cautery. A burning I can hold in hand and sear what’s past, your face briefly aglow then dark, the nerve’s path scarred over.

Paula Mendoza's work has appeared in Cream City Review, The Journal, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks include All Slither, Bruha, and 23 Below. If you feel a cold coming on, she suggests drinking several mugfuls of lemon juice, raw honey, fresh grated ginger, and cayenne pepper steeped together in boiling water. She lives and writes in Salt Lake City, Utah.