Kendra DeColo
Fantasy
Like a perv in a pickle park,
do you ever feel you’re standing outside
your own life, watching the scenes
unfold like a montage of favorite
Bang Bus episodes, highlight
reels of bukaki-reverence,
open-sore epiphanies
and the inevitable spermicidal
come-down? I used to follow
nice cars on highways, get off
at their exit, split
before the roads turned
residential but one time I made it
to a small town’s enormous
synagogue and, true story,
the driver of the silver Audi
was Ron Jeremy.
It was a High Holiday
and the street was loaded
with bright leaves. I waited
all night for him to come
out, imagining how good
it would feel: the two of us
at a diner eating soft-boiled
eggs, talking about the last
time we felt truly seen.
His green eyes would sputter
with gratitude and recognition―
how two shmucks like us
got to be so lucky
I don’t know, he’d say
taking a long sip―
But he didn’t see me
buckled-in and waiting
and besides, I’m not built
for that kind of pleasure.
Break-Up Letter to My Clitoris
Just because we don’t hang out
anymore doesn’t mean
you aren’t the single synthetic jewel
affixed to a dancer’s umbilicus,
last coin thumbed into a slot
machine’s decadent gleam.
To be a gargoyle above your
baroque foyer is more magnificent
than a water birth in the Playboy
Mansion, more opulent
than finding free condoms
in the back of a Limousine
but when I rise from the climate-
controlled leather seats
and leave behind a sleek stain,
it is a desolation. To think, one day
my fluids will take on a different
hue, and I will move through the world
dry as a penny. But you, clitoris,
will be entitled to every susurrus
of joy, a jukebox with one tiny
record looping inside.
Gold Soundz
For E.M.W.
I can’t stop singing that Pavement song,
the one that sounds like an old lime green
Volvo and bottles of Old E, like autumn
in the suburbs where rich kids do bad things
to each other in their enormous empty houses
and are still friends the next day. The truth
is that most of us would be fine, except
the ones who weren’t, the guy I dated
with the shaved head and rotten front tooth
who lived in the woods with two pitbulls,
Honey Bear and Jack, and punched a hole
in my bedroom wall before he disappeared.
Or the friend who stopped taking her lithium
after college and married a man who months later
stabbed her in the backseat of a car, left her
bleeding to death on the side of an unmarked road
and I think we used to sing this song sometimes
on our drive to Walden Pond where we’d swim
topless and yell at the lurkers, the man
who once pulled it out and we laughed
at his sad gesture, and it’s her laughter
I’m hearing now, her head resting on my shoulder
on the drive home, eating an apple
that had rested between my legs.
She was the kind of friend who’d laugh
that the apple smelled like pussy
and eat it anyway.
Kendra DeColo’s first collection, Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia, 2014), was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her second poetry collection, My Dinner with Ron Jeremy, will be published by Third Man Books, August 2016. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.
Return to July 2016 Edition
Like a perv in a pickle park,
do you ever feel you’re standing outside
your own life, watching the scenes
unfold like a montage of favorite
Bang Bus episodes, highlight
reels of bukaki-reverence,
open-sore epiphanies
and the inevitable spermicidal
come-down? I used to follow
nice cars on highways, get off
at their exit, split
before the roads turned
residential but one time I made it
to a small town’s enormous
synagogue and, true story,
the driver of the silver Audi
was Ron Jeremy.
It was a High Holiday
and the street was loaded
with bright leaves. I waited
all night for him to come
out, imagining how good
it would feel: the two of us
at a diner eating soft-boiled
eggs, talking about the last
time we felt truly seen.
His green eyes would sputter
with gratitude and recognition―
how two shmucks like us
got to be so lucky
I don’t know, he’d say
taking a long sip―
But he didn’t see me
buckled-in and waiting
and besides, I’m not built
for that kind of pleasure.
Break-Up Letter to My Clitoris
Just because we don’t hang out
anymore doesn’t mean
you aren’t the single synthetic jewel
affixed to a dancer’s umbilicus,
last coin thumbed into a slot
machine’s decadent gleam.
To be a gargoyle above your
baroque foyer is more magnificent
than a water birth in the Playboy
Mansion, more opulent
than finding free condoms
in the back of a Limousine
but when I rise from the climate-
controlled leather seats
and leave behind a sleek stain,
it is a desolation. To think, one day
my fluids will take on a different
hue, and I will move through the world
dry as a penny. But you, clitoris,
will be entitled to every susurrus
of joy, a jukebox with one tiny
record looping inside.
Gold Soundz
For E.M.W.
I can’t stop singing that Pavement song,
the one that sounds like an old lime green
Volvo and bottles of Old E, like autumn
in the suburbs where rich kids do bad things
to each other in their enormous empty houses
and are still friends the next day. The truth
is that most of us would be fine, except
the ones who weren’t, the guy I dated
with the shaved head and rotten front tooth
who lived in the woods with two pitbulls,
Honey Bear and Jack, and punched a hole
in my bedroom wall before he disappeared.
Or the friend who stopped taking her lithium
after college and married a man who months later
stabbed her in the backseat of a car, left her
bleeding to death on the side of an unmarked road
and I think we used to sing this song sometimes
on our drive to Walden Pond where we’d swim
topless and yell at the lurkers, the man
who once pulled it out and we laughed
at his sad gesture, and it’s her laughter
I’m hearing now, her head resting on my shoulder
on the drive home, eating an apple
that had rested between my legs.
She was the kind of friend who’d laugh
that the apple smelled like pussy
and eat it anyway.
Kendra DeColo’s first collection, Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia, 2014), was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her second poetry collection, My Dinner with Ron Jeremy, will be published by Third Man Books, August 2016. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.
Return to July 2016 Edition
