Poetry — August 1, 2013 11:50 — 0 Comments

Two Poems – Sarah Galvin

Jump On Stage With a Blast From the Orchestra

“I’m having a bad night and don’t want to talk to anyone,” was my response when I got a Gchat message from an address I didn’t recognize. Then the video chat box opened, and there was a naked woman eating pistachio ice cream. The night was bad because I’d gone to a park where my first girlfriend took me once, and I noticed all the hedges were shaped like hearts. I’d always thought she took me there so no one would see us—to have known the shapes of those stupid hedges would have changed everything. “I want you to watch me eat this whole thing while you fuck yourself,” said the woman on the screen. She was eating ice cream with one hand while the other moved steadily between her thighs, which looked soft. She was about half way through the ice cream when I came, and the video box disappeared abruptly. Staring at the space where she had been, my pants around my knees, I remembered how my grandpa used to tell me to “Jump on stage with a blast from the orchestra.” I always thought he meant “Look for the silver lining,” but knew better than to use words like “look” or “for” or “silver lining.”

 

 

The Bead Store

I think the dread I feel waiting for girls
to call me is a dread of the bead store.
I’m afraid of the thing that makes
everyone there alike.

What if my number in her
phone looks like the number of
someone who spent 30 dollars on rocks
with holes in them?

I don’t want to actually blow up
a car, but I hope that’s what people imagine
me doing when they see my
number in their phones.
I long for dancing
to feel like conversation.

Bio:

Sarah Galvin is the author of The Stranger’s “Midnight Haiku” series, which are neither haiku nor at midnight. She has a blog called The Pedestretarian, where she reviews food found on the street. The thing she loves most about reviewing discarded food is receiving text messages that say things like “I hear the bus stop on 3rd and Union is covered with ham.”Sarah is poetry MFA student at University of Washington, and her poems can be found in io, Proximity, Pageboy, Dark Sky, and Ooligan press’s Alive at the Center anthology.

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What am I?

Bioluminescent eye
That sees by the shine
Of its own light. Lies

Blind me. I am the seventh human sense
And my stepchild,
Consequence;

Scientists can't find me.

Januswise I make us men;
Glamour
Was my image then—

Remind me:

The awful fall up off all fours
From the forest
To the hours…

Tick, Tock: Divine me.

-- Richard Kenney