where is my arc, paulie?

should we sit this sky out, spread our
supply of sorry stars?

should we attempt to tell each other’s
rice paper bodies once more?

should we repaint haloes, revise
messy pages – fiction or nonfiction?

should we cast green peas, pearls,
caution? how thin a sprawl

of never, nothing can we spin?

intake / outcome

somewhere blighted with blackwater,

unforgiving residues of unease.
a thick tar sprawled      where there

once was a bridge,      a mouth,      an eye.
i am prone to ghost limbs,      loose

gravel, snares.
what you call change,      i call impact,

and grieve.
if there was an exit,      i would misplace

the keychain on purpose. 

i once desired change.

then came the empty peal of a found

horizon – the landscape nothing like. 

every subsequent may, sunlight
has pressed itself into a sharp outline,

the same revelation: i see the shadow
of the blue bedsheets through which

i used. i traced untrue. a push. a route

i must refuse to walk with you.

Lorelei Bacht is a person. Her recent work has appeared and/or is forthcoming in Mercurius, Anti-Heroin Chic, Menacing Hedge, Beir Bua, Sinking City, Barrelhouse, SWWIM, The Inflectionist Review, After the Pause, and elsewhere. She is also on Instagram: @lorelei.bacht.writer and on Twitter: @bachtlorelei