Tag: Poetry

• What do you bring to a picnic besides panic? (I answer a poetry prompt as if it’s 2013 Tumblr)

  ants attack the anxiety

  you folded neatly into the basket,

  between the potato salad

  and my love for you.

  they swarm,

  as if your neuroticism

  were made of sugar

  instead of trauma.

  the picnic is ruined and

  the day is too.

  i fucking hate ants.

  2026.07.26

• Walt Whitman Said It Better Than I Ever Could

  These are the strange in-between days,

  a fever dream I can’t escape,

  the unsettling quiet after the war.

  But is it after or is it before?

  Stuck in purgatory in this place.

  All I ever wanted was more.

  2025.10.29

• Lizard plays dress up

  I muck about in my ill-fitting skin.

  I grind my jawbone into grit. 

  I waft and I waver, and I wait and I wait. 

  My scaly shoulders suffer in the thick air. 

  It’s putrid, even rancid; every inhale burns. 

  I can’t stay here. 

  I make it halfway down the road,

  I let out a chilling scream then, and turn around.

  My sandpaper tongue probes the spaces between the dentin of my teeth.

  I lick the sediment from my gums and I wait and I seethe. 

  Oh, this alien skin. 

  I grimace, spitting out sawdust remnants. 

  The first scale has sloughed off and hangs suspended halfway down my back. 

  I am reptilian. I am panicking, and wishing for the grace that I lack. 

  A quick glance around, but I no longer care who sees. 

  I unzip this human suit, step out. 

  No, I step in. To myself. To me.

  2025.04.26