Gutter Lover by Ellen Boyette

Eaten by a creature of summer, bummer. In a sec I savor a water melon jolly rancher. Dancing tonally livid vapors simmer around my knee highs and I press a deer skull in beer. Rest you must my little purple finch, cockroach dribble of gilded inches croaking up from sick buttercups. You and I are facts in riptides, seismic beige the most outrageous Lascaux with a quinine sky. Buried vertically she thought Over my dead bod. You are nodding off while I scare squirrels and eat pearls so guess it’s bliss and should I forget the humming bird cake, should I forget the neutered scarves, should I forget the laser surgery one performed on my empty apparatus of Dracula teeth, let me remember your eye sockets falling across my leather backpack and asking “is something wet?” It always soaks up the diversions into something akin to rhubarb blood. I’m not hungry for anything when the apps restrict my cells from chaotic crushes into ether and neither are you, neon yo-yo dog walker ‘cross bog waters turned pink. In a dream my cousin was possessed and no one cared. You, dumb infant, deceit is perverse like a piercing. If you reckon then you reverse, curse A knife wound to dote, remote, corner of lambs sheered into gutter fluff. All I need to know is could it be enough to live in the filth of what made us soft?

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Ellen Boyette is a PhD student in English and Creative Writing with a concentration in Film Studies at the University of Georgia. She received her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first book of poetry, BEDIEVAL, was a finalist at Slope Editions Books, CSU Press, and Inside the Castle. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, Best of the Net nominee, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize recipient. She is the author of two chapbooks and has work featured in Prelude, Action Books online, Poetry Daily, jubilat, poets.org, The Bennington Review, The Columbia Review, Tagvverk, and elsewhere.