Hi! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Telegram, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thanks for visiting!
Opal Equinox
Purple smoke & pearlescent intentions,
I never wanted to leave you shivering in the dirt,
my timepiece white rabbit cracked.
Spider silk & sleeping potions
I always meant to keep to myself,
satchel cinched with pastel ribbon.
Scarlet weeds & clove cigarettes,
we almost tried to extinguish the flame
of every yesterday and overcast tomorrow.
Mistakes made late into the season
often charge, charred, into overtime,
leaving a wake of crow & flint.
Promises kept early in the day
rarely fall flat as autumn leaves,
picked up by investigators & instigators.
Arson never looked so pretty,
sparks starting from your soft palm,
heat storm swirling & calm as hurricane eyes.
Tinderbox holes stuffed with wheat & timothy hay,
he was a top-hatted scarecrow
who herded the murder he deserved.
Predatory Paradox
Purple suds start from her mouth
and slip into my bubbling cocktail,
giving it a mystical, absinthe aura.
I pretend the cost is inconsequential
because I’ve been abstaining too long
from long stem romances and, well, long stems,
the silk-tip, acrylic language of fingertips,
the pouty eyes and dewy lips
of another tipsy girl
like me.
I can hardly discern which shadow is mine,
my thoughts caught in caterpillar loops,
blue as the moon, then fuzzy as mold.
“Tell me where you live,” she slurs
like a self-hate crime, a curse.
I’m spellbound but unsure who’s the caster.
I offered shitty poetry and crushed pills,
but she wound up stealing both my lines.
She fingered a party favor down my throat,
sprinkled her negs with shiny compliments.
Did she know when she draped her nape in Punch Paradise
or when she slipped into an off-the-shoulder shift
that I was the mark, her sheepish she-wolf
worth more than a week’s wool in bounty?
Did she know that I know better?
Paige Johnson (@OutcastPress1 on Twitter and Facebook) is the author of Percocet Summer, the first book in the four-part series Seasonal Dissociation: Poetry for Distancing Dates & Doses. Johnson is co-founder of Outcast Press, where she curated and featured in the two short story collections In Filth it Shall Be Found and Slut Vomit: An Anthology of Sex Work.