JESSLYN WHITTELL

Dear Psyche

this year, let’s not vote for love.
Let’s rub ourselves into sand against each other.
Let’s be mountains and speak with mountain voices,
or scones passed on the table.
I’m begging this city, the giant dead
astronauts sleeping off its coast,
their fingers peeling into the tides,
waterfalls discoed over their stony flanks--
Psyche, does this rash look normal to you?
Do you want to push me into the cold bathroom tile and smooch?
How tall are you? I bet tall, I bet taller than me.
Tunneling with hydraulic needs,
I spoon the coastline, a whiff of limestone in my face
a plea in 10000 years to be quarried.
With long-suffering heat, I affix the curls to my hair,
my singeing lash upturned to the seasonless
interrogations of renter’s insurance, so like love.

I’m drying up for you, my tongue is poured out
is already clinging pouty and molten
to the lack of you.
A flinch of burning air divides us
some slight and efficient
conclusion I cannot make,
pang of hair bell-rung
in the smoke-orange light, fear
as close-fit doubling of better
sensation—listen, what if we fuck
until I remember the planet
exists? Even the curt ground has nothing to do
but root for you with rearing legs.

Psyche, let’s not flourish and say we did,
let’s wetland together, birding in flight,
take an egret’s egress into egregious.
I want to accidentally clip your teeth with mine,
discover all your edges.
Won’t you inquire politely after my internal organs
strung together with industrial whining?
Hurry, I’ll be a weather event by morning,
or a patch of grass so sweet you’ll smell your steps
leaking into condensation.

Jesslyn Whittell (she/her) is a poet and contingent academic based in Los Angeles. Other recent poems are in or forthcoming from Peel Lit, Action, Spectacle, The Indiana Review, and The Georgia Review. She can be found online @lofi__loaf