SOLAR GLARE

I don’t see the day as it is.
I see it as I am.
Ambient yellow makes the cloud black.
The chip on my shoulder is unlimited
utopian matter.
I miss the videos I’d record
when I was clinically insane.
Everything a sand dollar, a putrified token.
Everything a luster,
being restored. Old ecstasies, tying ribbons
around an electric fan.
Dull clamor of sheet metal.
The stomach of place, I can hear it,
digesting its bygone signs.
Its crystal balls and rubber pyramids.
Your corduroy mouth.
Your prelapsarian methods
make me want to wring all the dark in me out.
In the damp grey interior,
I catch light. A pool
of radioactive yellow
with a needle dragged through.

HONDA CIVIC

For a fleeting beat I feel so lovely, driving donuts
around the perfect object. The dinosaurs
are in my consciousness. Their footprints,
in Massachusetts. I keep a tuft of baby hairs
in my locket. The girl my friends like
sings of sexless sex. Her songs make me smarter
and dumber. I wade into the money sign.
Its styrofoam tongue. The air is sick
and nearly lifelike. I have this disposition that switches
every seventeen minutes. I have this tacit trust
in The Boy Scouts of America. I have often managed.
I hate arguing semantics, it makes me feel
like our language died. Like I’m being spoken to
through a megaphone, very far away.
I pull onto the pale sand on the winter beach.
When I wear my seaweed boa, I smell like everything.

Haley Joy Harris is a poet from Los Angeles, living and teaching in western Massachusetts by way of St Louis. She is currently completing her MFA in Poetry at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. You can find her other work in the Los Angeles Review, DIAGRAM, Fence, Little Mirror Magazine, and elsewhere.