1 poem
by Emily O'Neill
Emily O'Neill teaches writing and tends bar in Boston, MA. Her debut poetry collection, Pelican, is the inaugural winner of YesYes Books' Pamet River Prize for women and nonbinary writers and the winner of the 2016 Devil's Kitchen Reading Series. Her second collection, a falling knife has no handle, is forthcoming from YesYes in the fall of 2018. She is the author of four chapbooks and her recent work has appeared in Cutbank, Entropy, Hypertrophic Literary, Jellyfish, and Redivider.
This poem was longlisted for the 2018 Peach Gold in Poetry with guest judge Morgan Parker.
two wrongs can never equal each other
bleed the desert of its primary sugar
out late enough to feel the moon
as a knuckleball throbbing
away from my hand
you know they’re cutting
coke with fentanyl now & I’d be dead
if I had grown up in a different direction
instead I’m a cutting of could’ve been
petulant fruit knife sinking into knuckle fold
let the citrus in where it shouldn’t go
hot sting to carry us into tomorrow
there’s a hanged man coming out of a cave today
& we’re meant to devil eggs over it
I hear you slamming the front door
& pushing through clutter drawers, frantic
you know they won’t evict us & I’d be dead
if I believed in a sharp order to who does what
around here you’re so two-faced & I don’t get
to see any chambray sea or crush the past
into something easier to sweep away
I un-quit smoking every time I flinch too hard
& lately that shiver is daily can you smell it
brutal on my hands do you care about
what comes back around, all the hours
you spend praying someone else
solves the problem first