Benjamin Bartu

Image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash Somehow even coffee-induced head fatigue is currency. My contraband isn’t ketamine or thunder or pomegranates with garnets as arils. Apparently, it’s my ribs for existing with the surrounding indigo plumes. I write to you in search of refuge. Let me hide in your naval, under your sweater, where I might lopside and kill the lilies you pass, melt the wandering with salt. Courtney, I am afraid.

Image by Dhilip Antony on Unsplash I remember precisely when the skies opened and filled the wayfarers with thirst. It is common knowledge that there is will, and then there’s the rot that is inevitable. Of course, it never ends. Spring is the loneliest time, but the jacarandas keep coming and coming as if deaf to expectations. The things I know of this world are boundless: I do not know exactly what want is, but still, I want want to contrast the forever ache.

Enter City’s Inhabitants All my poems are attempts to copy, on paper, the poems before me: the inhabitants of my city. By day, I see them and by night, I write about them. In daylight, I observe how eyes compete with the dark circles beneath them for a larger share of each face, just as poem and white space wrestle to squeeze into one page. And at night, I wonder what each eye, shaped like a camera lens, had managed to record.