MiPOesias Magazine

Reb Livingston

Reb Livingston is the editor of No Tell Motel and the anthology The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel. Her online chapbook, Pterodactyls Soar Again is forthcoming from the Whole Coconut Chapbook Series. Her poems have recently appeared or will soon in Best American Poetry 2006, Coconut, mem and The Carolina Quarterly. She assists Carly Sachs with Lolita & Gilda's Burlesque Poetry Hour, a new reading series in Washington, D.C. Reb is Gilda.

Cold Storage

farewell to frosty things to that shivering shoebox

if sentiment means making cabbage of things

if cabbage presumes intimacy

if silence weaves tongues

if the city signals tendrils

if tendrils are wintered and false

the ankle cramp the shrivel all bloody mary mix

all hoarse all ice all daggers and sugar cubes

darling, it’s time

if all you can come up with is a thought

adieu

My Lover Beside

O how he positions his palms
presses his thumb above, almost historical
mouths the shoulder
clenched as crossword puzzles, scribbled and clasped

He asks about quality, its fuzzy whisper
a hidden, hungry thing

He gasps “Something queer is going on”
I nearly faint

Still Feeling It
still feeling fucked up and fake
still another day, still thick with hope
what a word wreck
what a display of linguistic insensitivity
a little something I call rendered and insufficient
a little something I call bohemian pain and one day
I’ll be alright again
thankfully I can’t keep making it new
there was a rare occurrence
I drank a bottle of wind
he looked at me strangely
I offered him
a Rolaid this seemed
staged
this seemed sentimental