Joyride & A Good Beating
new work from Warren C. Longmire
We met Warren C. Longmire in the Spring, when he threatened to steal the show at Morning, Fuckers for Mission Creek festival in Iowa City. Two new ones from Warren below; you’ll see. After the poems, some news on events and a submission call.
JOYRIDE
by Warren C. Longmire
Most things don’t require a god. An ottoman.
The Pacific Crest Trail. A handful of clay. My snoring cat’s tensing leg while trapped in a dream.
Most things don’t require language. The sun.
A cheap grocery store plant, its weakened stalk dry as drunk, arcing towards a patch of window without sadness ‘til shaped in by an adjective.
This youtube of condos getting shot in the face in Kyiv.
The day the trade centers puff into liquid again, an iguana will pluck a hovering insect off its own eye socket in a display of Olympic dexterity.
What is an iguana but an interesting dance on a Taino’s tongue right before Columbus decided they would make good Christians and then killed them fools like a G?
Iguanas don’t exist in the way a word is a shadow formed when some actual vibration of spacetime is occluded by a Columbus.
Most things don’t have an identity. The sky, Venus’ small quasi-satellite, or an eye tooth in English.
After the second tower’s load baring structs are impaled by a F150’s pinwheeling axel, a detached Skip-Ittm surfing on a cruise missile’s wake, a snot bubble will pop off the nose of a delighted infant a few kilometers north of Johannesburg. Ignorant of framing, all of the studders won’t blick.
A piece of styrofoam pressed into a distressed slab of wear is a rock if there are no scales left to weight it so I, like, thank my lucky stars for the way the morning slices through my loft’s bedroom window. I praise God.
Most things aren’t alive and most things are not human.
Columbus shot a trade tower into half the world’s temples and species die and iguanas became a cartoon fiction and the Gods choked on their own backstories as the words carved into the cloud servers demagnetized: the digits all zeroed and silent again, and the cattle prod of electron burst hummed in silence.
Most things don’t have a soul if there even is one:
A disturbance of warm air is the song of the summer and a gun shot. A well constructed birthday cake full of purple fondant and imperial pipes. A human heart, the flesh of it on a surgical tray and a floor tom crashing, most things. Almost nothing does, my love, but you do. Not you, not me, I said and smiled through blood warm tears from an adjacent seat in the hull of this spasming airplane.
Not us, my love. Not yet.
A GOOD BEATING
by Warren C. Longmire
My preferred fighting
style
is to lean in and tell them to hit me, cold and
unflinching.
Only one man (in front of his son and too
big for his body) had too. Ultimately
everyone feels the fire
of a righteous fight and also
everyone chokes on
smoke without years of
actually, burning alive.
We don’t like smoke.
What we like is the fear.
We are extremely
kinky for the real shit
like
trauma that rains on your
boring little meaninglessness like
a grape-sized
hail.
Running for a bridge, scared
to death and
laughing just before a rainbow
breaks in.
Anyone can be Jesus and
live.
When my eye socket splintered after I
took his punch, it felt like
a purple jellyfish in my head: I almost laughed.
Didn’t heal for months.
Today is an excellent day.
With the right word,
most people can’t help but show
their five-year-old, the demons parting.
You have a five-year-old too
small
dewy thing.
Pull down your pants.
Look a fear in the eye today and say, “I want you.”
Warren C. Longmire is a Negro poet, performer, and technologist from North Philadelphia. A co-founder of the Excelano Project Spoken Word Collective, his work has appeared in publications including Action, Spectacle, The Offing, and The American Poetry Review. Warren was featured in The Best American Poetry 2021. His latest book, Bird/Diz [an erased history of bebop], was published by Bunny Presse in 2022. He is currently completing his MFA in Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. You can find Warren at: alongmirewriter.com.
Send your pitch and two sample columns to: av@littleengines.pub.
Morning, Fuckers, our early-riser reading series, is going international. Join us for Winterruption festival in Winnipeg. TICKETS HERE.
Wow, Warren! Thank you for making me think.