Zombie sonnet
now that I’ve stopped drinking it’s like
it’s just me alone and sinking
into the underside of a world
of cold air, me not barked
not like these sexy trees, strong-muscled,
know exactly where to lift each root,
where to cover up.
now that I stopped drinking
it’s me sinking instead, and instead
of me jolly on a raft made of beer
I’m me watching what’s around
me and ending up in the same place,
except this way it’s bleaker and couldn’t
I just use some more bleakness
Amethyst
Wikipedia tells me that amethyst protects the wearer from drunkenness. Wonder if unpolished, sharply chunked, and buried in dust and mouse shit kind of weakens that power. Wonder if these three stones help me, now, taken from my dead uncle’s house, lined up on my dresser because I don’t know where else to put them. I still wake wanting to drink. Easy to try to hide this, the fact of the drinking and the fact of the not-drinking; woman with no image desires to keep her no-image, and these facts may interest you too much. I drank, sometimes too much, and it made me sad. After a long time, I stopped. Now that I’ve stopped, I have more time to think about things like rocks, slightly less for thinking about self-loathing. What I like about the waxy sheen of this purple quartz is that I call it amethyst. That I protect myself, sometimes, without knowing. That there are things that have no aura until I tell them to, and then they have more aura than anything. Amethyst I do not know your unbeautiful face. Only that you are weight—rough in the palm—to hold me down. I’m paper, I’m weighty, I’m here.
Leah Claire Kaminski's poems appear or will soon in Bennington Review, Boston Review, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Smartish Pace, and The Rumpus, and in chapbooks from Harbor Editions, Milk and Cake Press, and Dancing Girl Press. She's received Grand Prize from the Summer Literary Seminars, was finalist for a WICW Fellowship, and has received support from the Community of Writers, the Napa Valley Writers' Conference, and elsewhere. An Editorial Assistant at Seneca Review, Leah was educated at Harvard and UC Irvine and now lives in Chicago. Read her work on her website. Twitter: @leahkaminski IG: @leahclairekaminski
Photo by Jason Deines from Pexels