Garbage Ghazal

the street stunk like a gingko berry blossomed
an asshole. the source: a squirrel corpse beneath a bag of trash

my hands have held have thrown have undone
a made thing, relocated it renamed it trash

the squirrel’s mouth still spackled w/ teeth—its body yellow & slowly
missing like a banana peel underneath a bag of factory excrement

I open my mouth: tires screws cereal boxes chewed pen caps w/e
else pool underneath my body. I am belly-up naked & asleep on an island of plastic excrement

the reek the bile the vomit the shed hair
I do not rename them outside of my body why are they not also called trash

I avoid assigning similes to a body—a body in likeness is an act of de-personifying. except
there are no other words. a corpse like a banana peel. its body a stank, a self-trash

& what happens when trash does exactly what is against our law of it—
instead of other there. instead of its reek slushes the stomach—it becomes the stomach

Eurydice tells me what it’s like to die

(She spits out a mint that falls into a pillbox
She looks at herself in the mirror
The pink lipstick smeared & juiced her chin
She stares at the stain as she drums her finger on her bottom lip
She opens one of the drawers to her vanity & pulls out
a Diet Coke & an egg. She cracks
it & inside is
some brown sugar & a listerine yolk.
She turns around, her back to the mirror &
her back in the mirror grammared
with black-blue moles & aged mirror stains)

What kind
trauma do you think
you’re looking for

Kristen Brida‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Whiskey Island, Hobart, Bone Bouquet, DUM DUM Zine, and elsewhere. She is currently the Editor in Chief of So to Speak, an intersectional feminist literary journal. She tweets @kristenbrida