Ariel Machell
irritant peculiar
you’ve spread your jam too thick
the bread is weeping raspberries
& I’m still night-thinking how you
didn’t understand when I said I’m sick
of red brick & the greedy flick
of squirreltail— or you lied
either way I’ve stripped the birdseed
from the trees emptied my coin purse
spent it all on buckets of paint—
“stop fiddling & sweep up the trimmings”
god the bees are getting smaller
look at them & we’re all talking
in beelines— (that is in no lines
at all) “one never does know
what one’s saying” you’re always saying
thought clipsing mouth & I haven’t got
the proper eyewear
Saudade
Lemonade with too much sugar and the look
of a woman who’s felt the hummingbird’s
wake has held herself quivering
in her own hands wrested from the quick
When the lightbulb died you worried
it from the lamp and cradled it in your palms
the way the tongue fixates on the last baby
tooth the quiet unseen rattling
All I could think of that night was the moth
bumbling clumsy into aimless flight
gunning itself into the walls How it perched
once briefly on my nose
Days later when I found the cat batting
its dried husk round on the kitchen floor
I wondered what would have been
had I opened the window
Ariel Machell is a poet from California. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of the 2018 Silverman Family Memorial Award in Poetry from USC. She lives with her cat, Fern, and fellow poet, Vanessa Batyko, in East Hollywood. Her work has most recently been published in Gravel Literary Journal.