JERROD SCHWARZ

How to Haunt a Tiktok Cringe Compilation

It helps to think about your most vulnerable tantrums:

waking up to gunfire and cow scream,
calling him the devil just to hear it out loud.

There will always be too many young adults
trying and failing to be held, but I trend
toward the videos of pup play and vore.
Good god, it must feel like a waterfall

to wear the mask of something that only thinks
"I need more meat, I need less moon",

to huddle against someone's stomach polyps
and whisper, "I will never be more caressed
than this, I will only ever breathe
someone else's gasps."

Worlds Chat, the Oldest Avatar Chatroom

is abandoned the way gas stations at night
are abandoned; someone's paying to keep
the lights on, someone's paying to keep a gun
under the counter.

I don't know how to answer the only other person
in a low-poly space station when they admit:

              if he was mere inches closer to me,
              I'd have gotten turned into broken bone Jell-O
              and died instantly (hopefully).

The corduroy couch, where you finally curl
inside the sponge of your own oozy lungs,
will always cultivate new kinds of dust
so I tell them Glad you were unharmed!
and log off.

A professor once said to me that data has weight,
and all of it adds up to about as much as a strawberry.

Is it irresponsible to see every byte of porn
as a seed-bearing fruit? Is it less than reverence
to hope that every chatroom, every doctor's note
and autopsy report
makes the world a little heavier?

Sturdier?

Drawing of human head with brown hair and mustache and veined skin, followed by text that reads: Genetic Mutation; I Feel Anxious Today. You rolled into the canal, but I can find you: Phlegm trickles out of the waterfront cottages,and I can always hear a limping grandmother inside, her deep groans translating the wood floors with toe slag, heel bile. I will sing barbed wire out of the riverbed and follow the best cuts. Am I being coy? Am I ignoring the clouds of skin and children pupating their own diamonds? I have never felt more blessed than when your mustache grew back. I have never felt more love than the clay between our hands, the scrub of cells and cells and cells. You rolled into the canal, but I can follow the orange dirt for miles.

Jerrod Schwarz teaches creative writing at the University of Tampa. His collection No Name Atkins was published by CLASH Books, and his most recent chapbook, What the Barn Can't Kill, was published in 2020 with Blasted Tree Press. His poetry has appeared in VICE, Entropy, New Republic, and many others. In his spare time, Jerrod draws and plays Tony Hawks pro skater with his twin toddlers.