For Noah, today
I could drink from you
Salvation puddle seventeen kilometers away
Knees to dry dirt
Rain breeding dust clouds
I could crawl over
Salt skin scrape of tongues
Bite through green pear
Tear in sweet snap of skin
Bitten yearn of cold wind blown
Thirst heavy like parched mornings
Lilac skies satisfied
It fills the mouth
Is it easier from inside your cardboard box
Can’t see so far as a stone throw to the past
Pain nestled under heat
Mirage of someone who meant too much
Home in a prison away
Does the piss keep you warm at night
Warmer than a family the yellow river runs
It’s banks corroding
I feel it in the burning sun
Where does it hurt
Stuck cornered in the peeling of the wound
Peeled until there was nothing to do but see
Saw until there was nothing to do but turn away
Turned the wrong way and the game was lost
Was it sweet enough
Kidney stones of mnms of gumballs
Stings of stench
of liquor
of rot
Pressure on the black tooth that remains
Syrup fills the wound
Did you think of me
In the decay of leaves and heat of asphalt
A color or a toy
or the candy wrapper in the gutter
Pink blanket on the side of the road
Shotgun pellets in the blue bird
Tiny hand where it didn’t belong
Was it worth it
The rock like a curse the bottle like God
Untethered between you and them her and They
Man so lost a mother couldn’t love him
Gilded hand of who
Are you here in the eyes gleaming
That first time vitriolic haze
Heart and skin and sweat and eyes electric
Tv shattered like the dream
Death defied impressed by brazen disregard
Still sweetening the air
When did you know
A knock loud enough in its own insistence
Gut sunk so low it’s tipping the bottle
Chill like the desert in your hair
Omnipresent is there anyone we should call for you
Would you change if you had the time
Know that I couldn’t
Reach through time and feel
Something there that would mean everything
Change nothing but how it moved through me
Did you forgive me
Flesh on gas burner
Snot shirts fill the basket
Holding that baby who cried for you
So lost a mother couldn’t love me
Kept from the blue moonlight under cold dirt
Thousand eight hundred and fifty one days of silence
And what was that you said
Name on the tongue but no one there to hear it
No sign of you you didn’t know to leave them
Maybe left only in the sales papers
the bass
the velvet seat
the petting of the dog
Those words hushed and quieted in the corner
Between the forever and the bygone touch
Muffled in the black of that cardboard box
Sun fades your reliquary of pain
Home in a prison way
Desire For The Word, Pizarnik
I dream of my crumbling, mud seeping into ceiling cracks. Darkness creeping along moss, mold lines a cold stone. Run down the peeling blue wallpaper. Take my forgotten stairs up to a memory, I creak with sorrow. Dream of blood rich batter spilled, knife to cut in salted cake floor boards. Yellow light flickers, moths swarm hungry to me, a forgotten sweater. Remember the thick cool of tile as my tongue. Look behind this fogged up window to see my sickened field. Bed with its own pond. I dream of leading you through my body, my wood rotted. Soft collapse thickens the air. A last dream I have. My door opens earth, exits atmosphere.
Talyia Liebig is a poet living in their hometown of Stockton, California, with their cat, Chewy.
