DANIELLE WHEELER

from SOME HORROR, SOME HORROR,
SINGING IN THE FIELDS

THE GAME

They make out underneath the silos, in some other places replaced with a metal beam smokestack where you can find a section to hide and touch, all the hair in your fingers, all the lights tickling sister's leghair before you thought to shave as if some smooth beach dingledong could even tie on a bikini before the knowledge that all was lost is surely been lost much earlier and in many forms, in black and white and in the blaring sun of this day you are forced to babysit yet again and put on the sunscreen with touch to the reddest sore, baby he said I think I might be the bad guy tying up the soulless teeth of someone else’s wrought spirit and body and blood. 

Heat does rise

All these thoughts stadium bleachers beneath stadium kisses where

Thin girls bend

Your sunscreen is unofficial

Nothing I love more than the grocery store

Nothing I love more

It wasn’t Burt’s Bees, Juicy Kiss, it wasn’t the game, it wasn’t the devil rising with each touchdown a siren or the solemn smack of lipgloss heating beside the van he’d take us home as our skin warmed    I want it so fucking bad, It wasn’t legs pressed bikini trays in the sun full of ice cubes down a thigh, down a back the hair responding, that was before and beneath it you could scoop lower like with your hands met to pray, lower than that the hum that starts the music doesn’t interrupt what is always playing, the hands moving to jam the station but the station bees like you a buzzing, with your hair and your eclectic tonsils scream

THE MALL

he had a dream. it played in the dream. it was the song of the dream. i cannot decide from what i see in waking time due to the motions of that thought, i could find a man, or a woman in her eyes, to speak it to. it wasn't from my own as the dick who saw with those his spent teeth to close on me hotxxx  coming in too close and then it focuses back, but wasn't in it thinking as the way we can divide reason xxxx into no song whatsoever that haunts us, over baby, in the parking lot baby she talked about a ghost as if that was the thing but it wasn't the thing it wasn't the guts either oh my god, xxx said, your grill is hot and oh my god, what that even means when i am singing about willow trees when there i was buried because that's right, i'm dead, (and all this in a mall) i cannot understand, like one section of song that descends into every old bone knows it, i’ve never even seen a willow tree the song was inside and then i could see, still alive xxxx it was a million of like everything and there glittering there being no nature that we can inside try to imitate what songs were left when they buried them there to find, and if it comes out this way but no only the mall, xoxoxxx, where our bodies buried they walk above but i have the mall and the neon and do you want to believe, baby, they say, the food court lighting our hell they say baby over and over and i hear it, and i hear it oh baby, you are really my baby and we are dead i got out of there like so quick xxx

SOME HORROR

It’s a nightmare outside, Louis.

These horror girls like throwback cheerleaders rise into the night of the red backed drag race horoscope wanting, always wanting, always waving away their boyfriends lost cigarette until the last minute the bloom raises on their skin as it burns from the ashes of their lousy souls; blonde into grey into nighttime bugs singing the little sandman songs to the next waiting body.                          

It’s a nightmare outside, Louis, don’t you know it.

Caint find no place

All them boys is driving fast with nothing to go for. The bodies evaporate into steam and the headlights are making trailsights harder to find, as if it left anything of them but tattered poms and sparkle. Not for nothing we dig underground the forest floor just ten miles out of town now, not this town but another town similar in the small factory smells, not that you could talk about it. We heard it stretched miles long 

Danielle Wheeler has poems in or forthcoming in The Destroyer, diode, Caketrain, The Wolf, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook TEENAGE EXORCISTS is forthcoming from Slim Princess Holdings. She lives in Louisiana.