Joanna Novak
Two Brains
The menu is moon bathed in prison light
youth’s grilled cheese
sky updated with apps
a boy walks through a Denver of high walls and paper ceilings
capable culpable correctably cored
rotten and crystalline
sugar bottles that break like glass
celery that snaps like a neck
she didn’t faint—it was play
an optimist driving a bus
Plexiglas bricking off his seat
upbeat and upfront, upended
You can be a regular Mass-goer
answer the polls, God’s questions
goodgood well can you
So fence off convictions
his right
my wrong
the basement was dark
those nights capricious with coverage
I crawled beneath the ping pong table
where he liked me
the rug smelled so wonton
our thoughts were bloody chains across the screen we hid from his brother
What’s seventeen but a choice
A gut-punch deep into light
Didn’t come
Well I wasn’t dead either
some tits and a head for my thoughts
The butter melted off a pot
spoiled the Easy Mac
shucked the stove
Printed on my underwear were kissers
his tongue in her hair
they put me in a mood
a cellar of my own tongue
It wasn’t prison—
another brunette-on-brunette kind of night
Dark gulf of the soul with no cats
no checkmark no shock
no upside
You live and live and live and then swipe
One man judged me a thief
raw sugar with the oat code
two chocolate bars in my bag You know
about the nova
By then I was twenty
some free.
What was mine
A bird in a fence
chain link gaps where sweat drips
Chicken wire bubblegum horse shit
In other words
I saw pink stairs funicular
A red arch
kept my hair to my head
swishxswish I tousled for guards
and they crumbled
Asylum is code for garage
Sweetheart his thumbnail
longueur of sniffs and scrapes
We breathe the windchill on fleek,
kiss our love’s Miami
decade nothing but corks shot from his porch