Coaster step

all futures praise the mother in me

but I skew fatherly in the dark

toward the hooks of the circle

her love of the wheeling mouth

fills the pleats of the skirt

with a brim of 10 rabbits brimming

the city’s teeth tear at my waist

and where I falter a limit emerges

her chest dumped shamelike over me

the total lack of her cascading

the sudden distance of the spring

like a face turning

at night the streets are computational and scarce

a stranger calls the way I move earnest

means it as a compliment

but I’m here to rummage in excess

to drive the feeling ahead

to pay the suggested donation at the door

there are a lot of unspoken commands

but there are also spoken ones like those

of a line dance faceting between bodies

boaed in sticky light

grid unevenly together with them

I came to fumble my concessions

to corner the haze of vulnerability

with honky-tonk submission

I do love a compromised aesthetic

there’s a part of me that was tied

to a large river by the ruler of this echo

have I told you that

I’m crying over what I need

done to me sexually

how cleanly shame commands

says to me be a stone—

no silt—no a cow

with stones for eyes

Right on red

Look what I’m reduced to—
singing “This girl is on fire” at the cremation
during a no-burn ordinance,
petty tyranny of toxins I don’t understand
smiting the air of my garden,
lobbing into a box whatever I can wet and forget,
if it’s red there’s lead,
if I’m horny and you have a zoom call,
I avoid the room loudly,
swish through the kitchen seducing utensils.

I have good instincts – I organize myself
to make a catastrophe habitable.
I bite off the end and hold it in my mouth,
though the non-specificity of dissatisfaction is what ails me.
I couldn’t tell the cop who pulled me over
on my way to see you that I knew what I had done.
I didn’t know, but what I had done was turn right on red
when a sign forbids this.
Error gets lodged between us,
builds its nest at right angles.

And I couldn’t tell him how many of him
I’d seen the night before.
For a second my feet weren’t my own,
and the swallows startled by flashbangs were his accusers.
How can this world turn on any light?

When a cop enters a poem, you might expect
the poem to feel bigger, systemic even,
but in fact I’m finding the poem smaller,
the cop a limit and outlier.
In fact, my day continued apace.
I arrived at your place, and you had to go on zoom,
and I was horny, trailing accusation.

Jesslyn Whittell (she/her) is a poet and contingent academic based in Los Angeles. Other recent poems are in or forthcoming from Georgia Review, Annulet, Action, Spectacle, The Indiana Review, and The Georgia Review. She can be found online @lofi__loaf