Dispatch
I remember my youth as a study of violence:
others against me, me against others, me
against myself. Didn’t wanna be a boy,
but faggot sounded fine enough once the stung
slacked off, once his mouth adjusted mine.
Each room in this house is a heartbreak
I can’t escape. My jaw itches. Buzzing in my ears
never quits. I take myself out into the yard
& every nightmare I’ve ever had stares back,
swarming. I have to kill them one by one,
or instead, I guess, cleave a line in the grass. Do I
destroy a world that doesn’t sing anymore?
Even though I tended to its flowers all this time?
The Risk of Winter
1) Harvest a mailbox & let it rust, then place a key on a black string & rest it inside.
2) Enter buildings only from the east, exit only from the west.
3) Render a rock to dust. Mix with rainwater. Drink quickly. Don’t spill.
4) Identify the flowers growing from our necks, then burn them.
5) Something moves inside me & you wince. Time to unfasten.
6) Killing the individual isn’t necessary, but what other choice do we have?
7) Obfuscate. What is the sound of my voice when you’re not around?
8) Further up the road, beyond the dying oak, there’s a place to sit. Sit.
9) What is winter if not a reckoning. Let us lay waste. Let us begin again.
10) Inherit each other’s heartbreak. Build a valley. Keep it there.
11) Naming falls to us both, yet we can’t agree what to call the gap once it closes.
12) Thousands of words between us & we keep coming up short.
13) Endings are imminent. We’re here, after all, because our something elses ended.
14) Rituals abound. Each breath a funeral. Thunder. Thunder. Where’s the key?
Apocalypse #57
neither of us really knows how to start a fire & he keeps
whispering apocalypse like it’s a bad thing, a blight,
some animal’s shit on the bottom of his boot,
but the only truth i’ll accept is that all things end
in the end. there isn’t a way to keep warm
anymore & we’re both tired of our literal
circumstances metaphorizing the thing neither
of us is willing to say out loud: we don’t love
each other anymore, at least not in the way
we need to love to keep the dissolution at bay.
it’s late or early: the birds sing all the time now——
their sounds the aches in our chests, our aches
their sounds. i’d say that never has a world
so mirrored my despair but i’d be lying. he strikes
match after match, each of them dead. i crumple
more newspaper, gather more sticks. i don’t tell him
there’s a lighter in my pocket because i need to see
what happens. if nothing ends, then nothing begins.
J River Helms (they/them) has published poetry and prose in Bluestem, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Fairy Tale Review, New England Review, Phoebe, Redivider, and Sonora Review, among others. Machines Like Us, their first collection of poetry, was published by Dzanc Books in 2016. J has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and lives in Houston, TX with their partner. One of their favorite revenge stories is The Plot, a novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz.
