Chelsea Bodnar

In the dream, Love Interest from years ago becomes physically ill after hooking up w/ me

 

I am less poison, more the coffee spoon dripping into sugar
bowl,   I’m that kind of bad for you, minor stuff
& carelessness.  Discolored clot             not hurting anyone.
Your presence:   incidental,      your presence a small
perk in a bad deal.  I mean: I feel much worse, and
yes, this is       a competition.

O missed connection,              tonight my heart is chewing
its ribs                & throbbing its unholy body through the
gaps, it disappears,             it’s not something I want        or it’s
not something at all.  My rat’s heart sprints my skeleton,
my marrow   tunneled out.

You imagine you are hundreds of things
and you are hundreds of things, so what?           Blood blister
tipping inward,            reborn as a crater.  Right now I am
wanting something far away,       so buy and name me stars,
no—buy me a sinkhole in dead planet,          buy me a
sinkhole in the dirt of your hometown—I guess I can
survive there,                    I guess I can survive

all kinds of things

 

 

 

Chelsea Margaret Bodnar has read The Great Gatsby too many times, and thus her writing often tends toward romantic melodrama.  Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in:  Crab Fat, Cartridge Lit, Menacing Hedge, The Bennington Review, Freezeray, Rogue Agent, and others.  She is the author of the chapbooks Basement Gemini (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2018) and dead people’s bedrooms (Ghost City Press, 2019), and she co-edits the journal Everything in Aspic with fellow poet Stephen Lin.