Garbage Birds
do you want to hear about my boyfriend,
I ask the empty room,
unwinding the yarn through the labyrinth
in no particular direction.
he didn’t like it when I called some thing mundane,
as if I were casting it as a fault, as if it were an affront to the thing,
as if there is a greater fan of the mundane than me…
my ancestors are laughing at me and wishing me the absolute best
with this viking man for whom everything must be an epic poem,
odyssey, grand acquisition, romantic fiction,
other than the ravens we saw in the dumpster
having the time of their lives.
yeah, he said. big deal. they’re just garbage birds.
and I was just somewhere distant
seeing God in the trash.
Snake and Cow
writing songs about floors, writing about floors,
remembering emails with my ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend
who renamed herself the Swahili word for snake,
our brief psychosexual interactions through
snapchat, why, because women are under
influence of the serpent, because we like to lie
on the floor, because we are oft entangled, sticky,
have you ever seen a snake and a cow together,
they don’t get along, they will eat each other or try to,
now imagine being a genetic synthesis of them,
two influences in one body, to breastfeed and undulate,
to shed, writhe, swallow, swell, feed, send boob pics
to ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend, she liked them,
made kissy faces and complimented my poems,
which meant a lot at the time.
— Lydia Sera is in South Carolina.
header image: by Lydia Sera