she’s a god or a dream, something to let go of

By: Grayson Thompson

(thank you Ben Barlow for keeping punk rock alive, being my quarantine preacherman, and for writing “A Part of Me”)

my astigmatism scatters the light of her body across the night sky

he hits like planets aligning in slow motion

each graze makes it hard to breathe

without it, I feel the cold of the infinite stars

I hope you’re somewhere in the corners of my consciousness

softening where the shame lives

from there I hope you can see I’m stumbling toward you

knees first

waiting to collapse

palms spread like a bible

spine cracked open praying for you to reach through the inside

I found this poem in a punk rock band

an acoustic singer, like a preacher, with a voice rugged like bedsheets I

watched as the people sang back through the distance between them

change of key

slows it down

the preacherman said:

I was falling for a girl who would ask me to come over

just for a day, while her parents were away

now all I can do is lay in my room

fall asleep, dream of you, then wake up and do nothing about

he lost his voice

and I swear he was holding back tears

thinking of a girl

when he looked down

and heard the congregation fill in all the things he couldn’t say to her

I’m the boy in the sea of drowning voice

singing back through the window

behind the guitar strings

close my eyes

raise my hands

this is the only time I’ll let you shoot me

maybe you’ll hear my voice

in the back of some bar

in some place I’ve never been

I’m there

staring at the back of your head

crying at the halo

---

Grayson is a Black, queer transgender writer boi, a poet, moonlighting as a therapist. He has been featured in Carnival Lit-erary Magazine, Backbone Press, Belletrist Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, and High Shelf Press. A Florida cowboy with a West Coast heart, he chooses madness: of the wild, of the truth, of love, and of dreaming. He hopes you can find some in his poems.