Three Poems by Claire Lee
"If I put a gun to your head, how many bowls of pasta could you eat right now (sauce, garnish, gristmill included). Comrade, you think too highly of yourself..."
THE WHOLE LOT OF US
by Claire Lee
Mary’s old house, the stucco one off Poplar, burned to the ground last Saturday from a heating malfunction, nothing left but the dead roach in her kitchen, belly-up, three legs bent sideways. She had moved away a week prior, fancied herself some kind of writer, a born again romantic. She hasn’t been talking about it too much, but I know Mary believes in signs. Mary speaks the kind of language that makes you good at spotting constellations. We talked on the phone the other day, her screenplay, my marriage, the way the sun across both of our coasts seems to trickle into the cracks of our sunscreen. I was looking at our old debate trophies on my cabinet, the ones from back in college (I was “Most Improved,” Mary had won Sainthood), when she started talking about how maybe the whole lot of us might be doomed.
THE GUY FROM THE FUNERAL HOME DOESN’T THINK I’M FUNNY ANYMORE
by Claire Lee
I dreamt once of a sound, like something in my bones, like my sisters in the car when we got hit, the blood from her nose and the man in the santa costume. We still went to church and I did the lights on a cheap floor lamp and baby jesus was my neighbor’s nephew. It was a silly walk, remembered only by the blister on my pinky toe, but I can still taste the December Memphis cement, the candy from the corner store left for dust in my stocking. Sour like August, old, mothy, like my dead uncle’s house and the records he gave me when I was twelve. At night, I dream like a movie, the kinds I would never want to watch, and when I wake up, I hit the ground, mouth salty as a sore throat. Christmas has been thinning out, but maybe we all died that one year, maybe the pageant was our entry into the kingdom of god and his multiracial family or whatever. I’ve never been to a wedding but I’m almost done with my funeral punch card. One more and I get a free ice cream. Once a year, my mom makes banana bread in the morning but no one eats it anymore, busy chugging bloody marys to make sure the alcoholics in the family stay dead, the holy line ends with us. I want life for breakfast, early, before it gets weird.
ON THE RISING TREND OF EVERYONE BEING A BIVALVE INVERTEBRATE OR: A DEFENSE OF MISANDRY
by Claire Lee
If I put a gun to your head, how many bowls of pasta could
you eat right now (sauce, garnish, gristmill included). Comrade,
you think too highly of yourself, even if you believe in some innate
spine of honesty, a mollusk emptied of meat, still filtering algae from
its oil-drenched dock. The oyster from last week didn’t have just
one Jack Kerouac tattoo, and you would think two a mistake, three
a joke, but he kept going, a motel-room prophet jotting down lines,
every arrival rehearsed, every exit Quixotic. Imagine how embarrassing,
to contract norovirus from someone like that, sickness claiming the
functions of your stomach while he explains jazz and
Elizabethan poetry. The enjambment helps you feel the shock (apparently).
My short friend won the pasta contest, considering I could
only eat two bowls before my pride started swallowing itself.
The IUD was settling in like a parasite,
and I knew it was unreasonable to ask for a ride back from the clinic.
Call me when you’re done swimming,
tell me how the bread molds quietly, before anyone can notice.
Sometimes talking feels like looking at you from outside the cave,
watching shadows pretend at jokes, a mime working a crowd,
an audience laughing up seawater.
I’m not sure I’ve ever met a man I liked better than myself.
But I know that’s another kind of narrative,
(another way of being consumed).
My friend and I have started hitting each other as a form of resolution,
trading hail marys for the precipitous hiss of a rattling skull.
I’m not sure I’ve ever met a man whose spine wasn’t borrowed for the night,
an oyster not shucked, cracked open, swallowed whole.
Five Jack Kerouac tattoos would be just absurd;
good thing he had six.
CLAIRE LEE is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, The Pinch, Scapegoat Magazine, Pictura Journal, and more.
Incredible 💕
Intense. Especially "the IUD settling in like a parasite." That's perfect.