Some Call it Anxiety
Days softball into each other until weeks announce
themselves as months with sturdy shoulders and just
a touch of condescension. Breathe yellow hexagons
into the room right before I feel myself folding into
the familiar wobble of static, so I pour what’s left of
me into a coffee cup and drink. Fast. Reconstitution
is more daffodil than sulfur, though you might expect
the latter. For a burst as quick as New Orleans spring
I am an unrestrained garden of possibility, reaching up
past earth past fences over rooftops over divides. When
the rollback arrives, it’s with a soft sherbet sky pooling
unnatural orange and gummy pink before I can lap it up.
Am I allowed to rest now? Physiological data says yes,
though edges of consciousness crackle with more static
and I reach for spheres of life that unfurl into wetness at
my (I promise) weightless touch. Dream instead of
complicated bathroom situations, restrooms with
spiraling stalls that fall in on me, toilet paper made of
air that laughs when I unspool it, pejorative glares and gibes,
insufficient locks—water everywhere and you know
it ain’t the clean sort. I somehow know every one
of these rooms and my way around them—
I am never lost, but can never find a working,
private corner where I can relieve myself.
~
Blood Moon Eclipse at 5:04 AM
Red penny moon I can blot out
with my thumb, I wrap you in my
comforter instead and coil around you
in my bed. This way, you never have to
slide down into dirty silk light pollution
with the same unwillingness as the last kid
to get the bathwater. You can glow in a rusty
gleam of eclipsed light forever, and when
you need some sky, it will be me hoisting you
like a bronze medal I’ve won for weightlifting.
Or baking. I’m really much better at baking.
We can go to Costco together for baking
supplies, where you’ll be the biggest thing
there (quite a feat), except you are not for sale
and I don’t know if my dough-making frequency
aligns with the flat of eggs they have on offer.
When we hit a poetry reading later in the month,
you’ll clap the longest and the loudest for
the girl with the two period poems who reads
too close to the mike and I’ll be right there
with you ‘cause oh yeah—I get it. My boyfriend
is not jealous of all the time we’re spending
together since he’s more concerned with his
porn harvesting which would be fine but it’s
hit levels of junkiedom I never could have
anticipated and he’s spending more time with
those semi-anonymous dicks and titties than me.
You can go ahead and squash him if you want.
It would save me a bunch of fighting and then
explaining if he was simply flattened by a
celestial body, but that’s not your thing and I
can dig it. You tell me it’s time you return to
the tender grind of cosmic mechanics and not
to worry so much about the neediness of
ephemeral humanity, even when it comes to
blood moon eclipses and light pollution
because I too am but a flicker and should not
squander my luminescence. Before I can reply,
you’ve already found your quiet fade in a
stark blue sunlit sky, a spectral thumbprint of
the burgundy and indigo promise coming night offers.
Karen Lozinski hails from New York City and lives in New Orleans, where she befriends anoles and cicadas and enjoys Spicebush Swallowtail caterpillars pupating in her kitchen. She's a multidisciplinary artist who earned her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. A recent finalist for a Brooklyn Poets Fellowship, she’s also a Pushcart nominee. At work on a novel and a poetry collection, her writing appears in Mantis, The Citron Review, The Broadkill Review, The SoFloPoJo, Poetry South, Gyroscope Review, Talon Review, LEON Literary Review, ANTIGRAVITY, Chrysalism, and a bunch more.
