(painting of Frank Stanford by Ginny Stanford found in Beinecke Library)
Happy New Year
9:00 pm happy new year! I hear over the fence
Even the frogs are quiet despite the neighbors loud ass generator
I wonder if they died in the storm, the frogs
Of course Amy from El Paso has something to say
something mild to moderately homophobic and
mild to moderately sexually repressed to say
It’s so fucking beautiful outside the air is dry for once it’s like fall and
it’s driving me crazy I want to thrive in it
Scream in it fuck in it love in it
Is everything good we've ever had at the expense of another,
a perfect clear blue sky and low humidity
Because someone’s grandma's house is flying away and
someone else is getting their shit handed to them
I always thought extreme heat made me feel most alive now
I crave the stinging slap of winter on my cheeks
Shallot and sherry sausage, a good piece of hearty grainy toast with chive butter Sautéed kale and a cup of coffee, with the paper
All after spending the morning tending to each others softest spaces
I wanna read a real good novel
about Florida
a real juicy true crime with tall grass about
a game show trivia content creator at odds with
an air traffic controller solved by
a laugh track engineer
He used to say to me,
do you think we’ll all be vegan someday?
I mean, we’re so far removed from the process, from primal
instincts. we moved too fast!
It can be so hard to show your true self
vulnerability a challenge
to risk the nipple out
balls hanging, belly folded
Untitled Day after Frank Stanford
Cold coffee and cane syrup
Alone to the right
Chewing on a lemon rind
Grease streaking my fingertips
from a spitting skillet
Stroked into my hair
And pulled from my scalp
White like the moon
I don’t sit on the clover flowers
I am a mountain on the side
Bees work in the heat
I stare at them until the green light takes the
Corners of my eyes
Coming from nowhere and
Everywhere
The one I used to love ticks up
Peeling and spitting tails
Massage my spine on an ant hill
At a distance while he sucks spice off the
Mud soaked pink and white flesh a
Young boy in coveralls shakes the sand outta his hair
Cigarette ash like flower petals my love
Hollered up into the grass my
White boots dodging cypress knees jamming out of
Bricks spilling out over one another
Like the belly I think I have in my jeans
I swat a gnat out of my eye behind me big mouth spits
Sour fruit at the woman behind the counter
Good kush, big dreams
Baby don’t ask me what I need
She smiles at me while I take my honey to go
Dark storm clouds mix with the dawn of night
Two babydogs snap at me one on each side
Chained to posts and gate
A grapefruit swells in my mouth
Sage smoke floats out of a window
A woman with hair like wildfire in brush
Steps into the doorway of a house I never seen nobody cross before
Big Dumb Crush - The Reboot
I’ll never live down that text
Suck and fuck
Dude you shouldn’t have told me you sent that
And ride
I’m going to have to say that to you all the time now
Back then
There was floral wallpaper
Or maybe it was a floral mattress
A maybe floral mattress with blood stains
From my knees and
From my insides
now
My vision has a pastoral glaze
Its overshare summer and
The pendulum has snapped from the kickback
The glaze is sticky and vegetal
Glossy and iridescent
Backyards with VCRs
Too much stuffing full of weed butter
Cheap beer and slippery freezer burned hot wings
Intoxication by sweat and fuzzy guitars
Smokey porches, steamy basements
A reunification and a coronation
Youth and lust and all that surged
Resurfaces and ripples in the glaze
Here the fruit is heavy and even the pits are sweet
I tell him when he walks around in my dreams
Conjured at least once a year and I swear
Its true
I believe in my dreams
Unknown Legend
Too much gas
No
Brakes, no brakes
I didn’t roll around in cat shit but I’m sprayed by the thumb in the hose
Dragon mouths have no muzzles spitting on
Years of liquor confessionals
Can I crawl inside his mouth so full of teeth
Please
I’d tell him I’m decently grown now
I’ll show you
And I prefer being stoned or sober, really
Dry my scales in the sun
Steam floats from my chest
The other day down the block one of the guys
The guy that I need to know
I’ve been told
The guy that takes care of everyone
I know
He said
Can I ask you a personal question
I replied yes
He said
Do you have an old man
I replied I used to but I’m doing me
He said
You sure are pretty
Goodnight
Goodnight
We said
I can’t tell the guy down the block about the text
The moon is in Aries I’m told and
My dumpster fire has wheels
There's been a few
Dumpster fires around town
I thought she’d be there holding daisies, she always waits for me
Claire Dahm lives in New Orleans and works in film and music production management. These poems are selections from a recently published collection titled Big Dumb Crush. The collection is inspired by and exists as a tender offering to the exhilaration and intoxication of having crushes, whether on people, dreams, places, or memories themselves. Their intensity, leaving a smoldering crater and, from within the fall out, its own life forms grow.
High Horse 