JUKE
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JOINT
Still, Days
While I ate my oatmeal, I saw Hope on the milk carton.
What’s missing: hope, the milk carton.
I tried to write hope into a poem, but couldn’t.
The words scattered like iron filings anytime my hands
came near them. Everything has its own magnetic field
of sadness.
A friend told me there are mountains in Upstate New York
with no fossils, formed before life.
What feels impossible: time, to be stone-clean, to be
unmovable.
Today’s losses were the heaviest they’ve ever been.
I tried to punch pain’s ticket, let it leave through
clear trains down my cheeks, but it wouldn’t.
Still, days. Still days. I am full of pain & fossils.
I think I gave up a few lines ago, the poem on grief,
or was it hope?
I turn off the lights. The poem glows.
The Beginning of Love
As we walked down the dirt path,
he reached up & plucked a small fluff
of cloud from the sky, then popped it
in his mouth like cotton candy.
Want some? he said, pulling another.
How did you do that? I said.
I don’t know, he said. I was just hungry.
I knew right then the power he would have
over me.
His hands. His hands.
I couldn’t stop staring.
A Part of It
There is nothing a piece of carrot cake
can’t fix, except
climate change, except species dying.
Last night, I took out a big bag of waste
& a squirrel with half an apple hanging
from its mouth crawled atop the fence.
I tried to tell him it was probably
poisoned, not like a fairytale,
darker, human.
Liquid greed makes the skin shiny,
but the squirrel couldn’t listen,
couldn’t understand
how something a part of nature
could harm him.
To walk out in the cool evening
& feel alive.
To walk out in the cool evening
& watch the green world moving.
To apologize.
To really mean it, but still Postmate
the piece of carrot cake, then
throw away its plastic.
Grant Chemidlin is a queer poet and currently an MFA candidate at Antioch University-Los Angeles. Recent work has been published or forthcoming in Quarterly West, Iron Horse Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and River Heron Review, among others.