When I Was a Child I Hid Inside a Tree
You don’t look like trouble
and the air doesn’t look cold.
Only slightly smoky,
Like the room.
On the head of Sentinel,
An eight year old child
Lit a Yellow Pages with a blue lighter
And now there’s a black map
On the world.
It’s forming a brand-new plan for itself.
This isn’t a metaphor.
It’s just what happened.
But the smoke does feel as trapped
In the valley as we are.
The bees have slipped inside the clapboard
Like free jazz
Reinventing buzzing.
I don’t dress like an optimist.
So don’t call me one.
But somewhere along the way,
After the sunburn peels
Like cheap patched concrete from the freeway,
You’ll call our asthmatic nap
a rare treat.
Don’t be ashamed to be masculine.
You can still sleep in the grass.
Opacity
I don’t know how to layer the paint without hiding anything.
We’re at the afterhours gallery at the hair salon and the artist is
smoking in the door frame. He’ll smoke until the gallery closes
and I’ll help him carry the dryer chairs up from the basement
and reset the room like a prayer circle. The artist is a bunny with
two cigarettes for fangs. Opaque, in the sense of a heavy mood.
The last few members of the crowd form a campfire with their
embers. We sit in our campfire circle inside the dryer chairs in
our bunny suits and spin out our eyes in all directions. Each
person, a corridor. The artist invites me to his studio. The studio
has tall ceilings and a narrow floor. A painting for each of three
walls, for the last wall, a window. That’s where I find myself.
Circles of trees over a bench, a lamppost, and a wastebasket. He
wants to show me what he’s made of: gimlets and vichyssoise,
amity. Cool breezes from a distance. He says he’s moving soon
because the room has no imagination. He can’t retreat from the
canvas. Narrow floorboards narrow. He sinks his brush into the
paint to paint himself. Insomniac. He is what he glues together.
Night creeps. His circles progress without me. I know by his
paintbrush that the year is done. It’s been a year. He loves me.
I step out from under his friendship into the street. A man steps
out from a storefront to hand me a dried marigold. I compliment
the man on his black leather jacket and he hangs it on my
shoulders and says, I think you’ll like it better than me, bunny.
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Jasmine Dreame Wagner’s writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, BOMB Magazine, The Georgia Review, LA Review of Books, and Witness. Her third full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Omnidawn Publishing; a chapbook, Cold Spring, is forthcoming from Gasher.
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nat raum is a disabled artist, writer, and genderless disaster from Baltimore, MD. They’re a current MFA candidate at the University of Baltimore and also hold a BFA in photography and book arts. nat is also the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and managing editor of Welter Journal. They are the author of preparatory school for the end of the world, you stupid slut, and specter dust, among others. Past publishers of their writing include Delicate Friend, perhappened, Corporeal Lit, and trampset.
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