By Audra Puchalski
Vow
Our love is leonine, is wrapped in fur, is maned. The mass of it—
the mane—lends our love
its gravity, draws us to it, such that we don’t know if
we are held to our love by our love’s
gravity or if we ourselves are pieces of our love, two bits
of matter adding mass to the mass
of our love. If we are drawn
to the mass of our love or if we are part of the mass
of our love, our massive impressive engaging large
love. Our love is the sun, wreathed in golden light.
Our love is lowercase for purely aesthetic reasons.
Our love is meaningless:
a collection of sensations and memories and
an undying desire to be together forever and that’s it,
nothing more to it. Our love
is an orchid coevolving with its pollinator: our love
has an extremely long tongue. Our tongue
is galloping through a flowering, buzzing, golden meadow
on the back of a white horse tossing
its massive, flowing mane. The lion runs alongside
the horse, two flowing manes. All poems
must mention lions, horses—that’s the law on the planet of our love,
the only planet I know, the one
I have evolved to breathe and cultivate my microbiome
on. I could not survive another biosphere. My body
would collapse like a society
collapses, like a government, and my body, ungoverned,
would crumble, a granite stair, a stair made of
impractical materials,
under too many heavy booted footsteps.
And the fragments of my body would rise
one by one, from the hostile alien surface of not-our-love
and drift slow and distant as asteroids towards
home.
My Crimes
I’m so tired of my crimes, spinning
in the center of the room. My crimes,
a machine with a spicy voice ticking
and purring. A machine that appears, that
scratches, that flees. A feral machine
that bites. I’m tired of the room
where I pile on blankets woven from
my crimes. I was found guilty, sentenced by
the judge (me) to sleep beneath
this pile of misdemeanors, of felonies,
of parking tickets soaked with my tears.
Do I have regrets? No! I wanted this.
I deserve this. I am so tired of my tears
and their tides and all the crimes
I had to commit to earn them.
I’m tired of the loud noise of the crimes
and how it keeps putting me to sleep.
What even are my crimes? Did I actually do
any of them? Who was I, in the room—
the smoke from the woman’s cigarette
unfurling through the slatted city light?
How can I do crime when I’m being torn
apart by tiny movements of the air?
At least that explains why I’m so
tired. So tired I forget why I came in here.
I forget my whole list of crimes. I forget
my trial and my wide open life stuffing
clouds down its throat. I swim towards
the surface. I don’t remember anything
but that light.
Ribbons and Elastic
We dance and our bodies
are elastic, the party expands
to fill the room. The larger it gets
the tighter, like an elastic. We party
harder and harder, faster and faster
like hot air inside a balloon.
I tried to tie a ribbon to my life,
couldn’t get the bow to hold—
but what I do know is,
I have hope for my anxiety.
I believe she’ll succeed—she loves
establishing procedures and filling
out forms. Emergency contact
name: House Party Balloon Carcass Detritus
Relationship: How do so many of us survive
for so long with bodies so soft, physiologies
so fragile, surrounded by dangers
and toxins and why did I not die
long ago on a gorgeous wooded highway
amidst the green hills in the clear
endless sunshine? My body dragged off
the road, my antlers coincidentally
pointed towards the sea?
Sensibilities
Eczema blooms slowly on my left arm, a pink
rough-petaled carnation falling open.
Life feels like watching someone paint a picture of
a paintbrush painting a picture:
I want to take my shirt off
and lay it in the wet paint
so it sticks. All these layers of separation
dilute our wild imaginings until they break
and fall off the canvas. But
I’m really happy
because I made myself a cool t-shirt
and I wanna make more. That’s
what it’s like. Like I wanna ride the horse so
I paint its saddle on,
and that’s what I do with my mind. Furnish it,
decorate it, “cultivate my sensibilities,” as Laura used to say,
Design and deepen and accent my interiority.
Put a diva in a pink dress in my diner,
dancing on the counter. Eczema blooms
on my left arm, then right, and I erase it
with allergy medicine that’s supposed to go up your nose,
because my power is vast
and I have not yet found its limits. I’m struck by
the sudden feeling there’s
a pulse to everything and
I can hear it, or I can’t not hear it because I
am it, and it doesn’t matter if that’s real because
I’m in the river now with the rocks and crayfish, the little leaves
I tossed as a child
to watch them float.
They’re still floating. I’m carrying them
in my hands and hair.
I’ve built my whole life out of them.
Flowerbed ♥ Boot
This bouquet of neurons is how
I pull my hand away from nothing.
This garland of nerves alerts me
to a foreign object
lodged beneath my skin,
stinging. This hum
obscures your voice.
Some blossoms,
you stomp on them,
you just release their seeds.
Your larval heart
sleeps in a honey pot.
I fumble in the weak light of
your pale impassive face. A girl
once killed a spider because
she thought it was the moon.
About the Author:
Audra Puchalski lives in Oakland, California. Her poems have also been published in Juked, Cotton Xenomorph, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook is forthcoming from Headmistress Press in 2020.
About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQIA+ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as "queer," while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream. Submissions are open from June 1 to July 1. Poetry, prose, visual art, reviews and interviews will all be considered. Visit Submittable for more details.