Three Poems, stephanie roberts

 

SOMETHING TERRIBLE IS GOING TO HAPPEN

i don’t know what

but something

and soon.

this is my first memory.

i’m going to write a book called god awful poems

comprised of the most red love poems

my sad glad mad heart can mustard.

mustard (the colour of sorrow’s altitude),

what best befits the travesty of tube steak

not vile sweet tomato sauces.

something terrible isn’t going to happen,

and the lies about love i believe in ain’t happenin’

neither—no matter how much the poets sing.

i’m going to write a book called a poet’s gotta eat;

it’s going to have a poem about this couple sitting

across the aisle, touching each other religiously,

comprehensively kissing the hollows of their

hope, nuzzling the pulsing plains in their necks,

counting with lips the knuckles they will bruise,

all before one or the other goes to the washroom

to empty themselves. i will script this mist in a diabetic’s

blood as the insoluble truth about love.

i’ll sell you above your romanticism or cynicism.

you’ll wander the earth wanting this terrible terrible

to strike you while little by little your heart

muscle withers when you hope love is happening

and it isn’t.

you will remember your first memory.

you will be in the book of god-awful poems.

 

 

re: stacks

my love is like a pair of shoes,

there was need for,

bought in haste 

down 

an unrepeatable street

at the base of a mountain

along the bay of naples

on the coast of amalfi,

made of scarlet leather

with cheek-tender lining.

did i already mention haste?

they were my favourite;

the first time 

i tried to say

amo le scarpe. 

i gave them to you

(tho you can't wear them

because you've never

seen my mountain nor

walked down the 

happiest moment of my life

all of which miss you now).

we two-stepped to bon iver,

we side-stepped the obvious

and today i see them 

on your back porch,

in the rain, not ruined,

they were sewn too well

for forget, but under 

the downfall they are

requesting a change

of song.

COME BACK AND SOLVE FOR X

Longing we say, because desire is full of endless distance. – Robert Hass

somewhere inside stillness you move

your thirsty hunger upsets time

am i solving for your happiness or mine

it would help to settle the perimeter of beginning

it would help if we defined our variables

who is the cause of our effect

come rest your atlas on my axis 

pivot on our common denominator

instead of this endless expanse of irrational numbers

at the finish of this i want to line up x

to the third power with u and carry them and live there

inside your y until the end of pi.

To read a review of rushes from the river disappointment, via the Montreal Review of Books, see here.

To purchase copies of rushes from the river disappointment, see here