JAMIE TOWNSEND

BE SURE TO WEAR FLOWERS IN YR HAIR

Femme fatale bent

Imperious over a tall drink

Dripping with sherbet

Sweating, God calls not it

We linger at the ocean

To pretend your interest still exists

The separation between

Water and sky disappears

It’s like Basic Instinct

vs Fatal Attraction

Cold blood under the mask of

Domestic bliss

what the California coast line engenders

A sunset dramatic enough

To transform a stock image

Into attention

Into last call

Sun meet the end of all our days

EYE CANDY

We crave the most delicate treats possible

With a mix of modesty and rapaciousness

Our body is a sensefield, all buzzing satisfaction

Swelling with milk from the source

Miley Cyrus tried to reclaim it though she’s returned

To the country that once spat her out lukewarm

Pasties are both a shell and lure toward what’s beneath

Even the package is slobbered over

We pursued a career of decoration

In a manner that still feels meager, even starving

Purple frosting is not a fruit

A tiny bride is not an edible arabesque, not a cursive script

Let them eat cake until they’re queasy

Until staleness chokes out them

We’re always talking about insecure men

Their irrefutable taste

How having a body is a sin

And subject to condemnation

We can’t get it out of our mind the man

Fed spaghetti until he burst in Seven

Or barely existing in a vacuum that denies everything but hunger

Where a cold gaze drifts on the slightest movements

Ass, thighs, a fat beating heart

Our tenderness backlit for display

A dick always finds someplace to hide in plain sight

A little dough goes a long way

LAMICTAL

You don’t shield a baby from time

It just creeps up on them and zap

A lightning rod with face powder

A mess all over the receipt

The song says we were born this way

Our shit don’t stink, we smile and spread it

On the walls a forcefield

To keep out the threat of good taste

There are too many temptations to control

We’re taught deescalation and regress

Into the smugness of a safe room

A translucent plastic bin

Where we keep our toiletries

We lug around the vulnerability of it

With something approaching pride

A soft boy with a big stick

Knocking the sun out of the sky

Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet and editor living in Oakland. They are half-responsible for Elderly, a publishing experiment and hub of ebullience and disgust. They are the author of "Pyramid Song" (above/ground press, 2018), and "Sex Machines" (blush, 2019) as well as the full-length collection Shade (Elis Press, 2015). They are also the editor of "Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader" (Nightboat, 2019) and "Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk" (Jet Tone, 2019).