She said she loved poetry when young
but refused to dog ear her books to mark a poem,
instead eating the page to taste its meaning.
A first bite is the routine excitement of umami
quickly vanished by a monotonous texture.
Considerate of her food, she liked to eat in silence
- forever terrified of a yet-to-be eaten morsel.
Gnawing a hard taco, she curses in French
the noise from her molars. Her anxious gut
biome anticipates the bolus like a dictatorship
grown lazy of pulled nails.
When she was a child she walked in circles
around Montreal’s squares. Large circles
soon became pirouettes quickly confined
to rotations of the world around her.
Today’s stroll is no different. She dervishes
despair into a mental map that fails
to convince her of the uselessness of algebra.
As a teenager, she scraped the roof of her mouth
with her tongue like the neighbor’s dog
cleaning a dead cat’s coat - a palate excoriated
into shredded flesh.
It is not yet Wednesday but her mouth is polished
bone in anticipation of Saturday’s coitarche.
She grabs the Fiskars scissors to lance her maidenhead.
Cerise dots on a ceramic tile.
Insomnia was scored with sleep-speak
chess-playing ghosts being no substitute
for loneliness.
She is distracted by rain on the skylight
when Leroy – tonight’s specter – threatens
check mate to her somniloquy. She is certain
he is cheating.
In London she took to mudlarking the Thames,
to make friends amongst Victorian pipes
but only found a Roman coin.
Yesterday she finds a Clearblue® with a +.
Hopeful for her thrice distracted uterus
she sees two magpies and one crow: une fille?
Unable to see another corvid, she lights a book
of matches and eats them, one at a time.
__________
José Buera is a Caribbean/Latinx poet from Dominican Republic. José was selected for the London Library Emerging Writers Programme (24/25 cohort). In 2024, he won the Happiful Poetry Prize and placed third on the Plaza Poetry Prize
This poem was chosen by Anthropocene Guest Editor HLR.
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