Self-portrait
In the woods he is a woman, & she sleeps in leaves, her mother’s hand warm in her pocket, his neck bruised from his own kiss. Autumn calms down into dying, a fleck of rain on her chest, in the dream he grows a petrel’s wing. Flight follows the sea, where the only fist or fixture is the contour of a wave. Her undulate breath. Afternoon & in the woods she is a man, full of fear, thirsting for nothing. Forever bound in change. Forever unwrapped & emptied. Nudged softly by doe’s antler.
From the couch
For Dr. K
A circle of change
catching rain with
eager tongue
a catalogue of
each insult into skin
I spill
you say moving on
will be easy but never
asked how
I manage morning
my mother’s fists
coming in through
my little window in one
hand a bottle
the other grips
a seagull by
the broken neck
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Chase Berggrun is a poet from Yarmouth, Massachusetts. They are the author of Discontent and Its Civilizations: Poems of Erasure, winner of the 2012 jubilat Chapbook Contest judged by Peter Gizzi, and their work has been published in Washington Square, Beloit Poetry Journal, Hanging Loose, Out of Our, among others; and in the anthology Time You Let Me In: 25 Under 25, edited and selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. Chase completed their undergraduate degree in English and Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where in 2013 they were the recipient of the Class of 1940 Creative Writing Prize. They are currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU.