Reece AJ Chambers: Favorites

Mar 2015 Reece AJ Chambers

Molly

I live for these days,
cold, wet and rainy,
overcast and hazy,
smoke-filled, getting wasted
in cars with the boys
ripped jeans soaked to the waist
in motor oil, cow **** and meal.

Flat tyres, rollies,
tar stained fingers, and buying
his girlfriend's morning after pill,
my best friend beside me
and it's not
impressive, it's not my degree,
it's not the big city
but it lives in me.
In the deepest part of me.

Mar 2015 Reece AJ Chambers

mulberry skin

Mar 2015 Reece AJ Chambers

Sarina

mulberry skin

the boy I am sitting cross-legged in front of
shares the same bruises as me
and we create new ones
on each other,
swelling like sweet gumdrops

or ripe fruit. his hands mold me
into a mulberry –
I bleed

sugar and water and sap. I close my eyes so that
it can be a surprise,
the stains I will wear for weeks.

we have loved so hard since we met,
we created puncture wounds
into each other
****** the salt out
then bandaged each other up and smiled at

the soreness.
the togetherness of it all,

opening ourselves up so that the other
can love our insides, too. his
is the burn of incense with the silk of warm
milk,

and I am laying down
in the happiest ache from him
knowing we wear our skin down until it is so
thin that
we can't help but feel all of one another.

Mar 2015 Reece AJ Chambers

the women before me

Mar 2015 Reece AJ Chambers

Sarina

the women before me

Men have always told me that I am nothing
like “her” - the woman, the women,
before me.

I love like powder

silently leaving pieces of myself to sink
into their skin

(making them softer, sweeter).

My emotions are a hum in the room,
they steal all the air

but I am hush
and small; I exist in only the smallest ways
like noticing a man’s veins
then

caressing him in circles,
tracing him
connecting them like vines. I pretend

it does something,
I pretend to cast a spell

but I never say a word – I am the ghost
of hope
for men, I am

their good luck charm

(my magic
never noticed unless it works). Never am I
like the women before me
but how

I wish I had the strength to be.

Feb 2015 Reece AJ Chambers

College

Feb 2015 Reece AJ Chambers

svdgrl

College

Silly me, sitting in a new class,
feeling like a social disaster.
At the front, there's no one
to hide behind,
no one who'll turn around
to ask for a pen.
That first interaction-
a distraction from reclusive habits.
There is a bag and jacket
sitting in the seat behind me.
My writing is all that dares
to converse with me.
It's quiet company
amongst the chatter of my peers
the voices I wish I didn't hear.
When teacher asks our names,
and I stutter to respond
there are whispers in my ears.
Am I the only one?
Who doesn't know a soul-
who couldn't say hello,
when that girl's smile showed?
It's not a place I'd call home,
so I keep my nose in the chicken-scratch-
reading the syllabus
silly me, in a new class,
whispering social disaster out loud.

#social #anxiety #school #college #class #issues #silly #outcast

Feb 2015 Reece AJ Chambers

the anatomy of humans

Feb 2015 Reece AJ Chambers

Sarina

the anatomy of humans

we are the possessors of hair
whose instincts
tell us to wrap it around our neck,

we think about
bottling our spines in jars
for good luck.

in the summer
our veins fade into our tans
as if drawn on with a teal colored pencil

and we powder our flesh to look like
sugar cubes instead.

this hatred and this worship of
our bodies
translates into
an aversion to our fluids as if to touch them
is to slurp creek water
but it is not poison: it is magic

Feb 2015 Reece AJ Chambers

clam

Feb 2015 Reece AJ Chambers

Sarina

clam

There is no such thing as the body of a fourteen year old, no such thing as the body of a sixteen year old. During those years, we are little more than crime scenes with tongues that simultaneously desire to carve ice cream from cones and fluids from bodies. We tempt such sins to the point where we are guilty of them, as if we committed them ourselves, and our lips never need part for it to be so.

I was an anxious criminal; my mouth took on the appearance of chewed-up bubblegum, engorged and pink from trembling teeth. Those teeth, budded like pearls after years of being fertilized by saliva dewing onto my gums each morning, made me a clam to men – something to open for the beauty inside. And I would be torn open, if need be. A crime scene.

Feb 2015 Reece AJ Chambers

scratch

Feb 2015 Reece AJ Chambers

Tom McCone

scratch

we twist, moths, to the light
in one another's eyes. this slow
dance, through loneliness. nothing
looks like all verdant expanses- thickets
of wind, icesheets. spread heart to
fragments; points of light above
borealis, your spinning skirt. daybreak.

eight-eight hundred is a ****** of
a number, though. all volume does
dissect, though: given time, pace.
sheets smooth.
tunnels of sharp rock, most days.

and here we step, tiny specks,
blinks apart, in coat of grand
nameless machinery. words
leak, as the length of
mid-afternoon; i can
barely breathe, sometimes,
stuck in these swales of
blush& noise. it is
wonderful, sometimes,
this slow twist under
city lights.

we dance, moths, around
this sharp-tongued
flame of worldly woe,
of each other's lips.

still words escape me

Feb 2015 Reece AJ Chambers

staying

Feb 2015 Reece AJ Chambers

Sarina

staying

you slid your thumb into my pulse like a thimble
pressing hard enough to stain –
my body has always been a crime scene,
you
just make it visible.

death groomed me for many years; it
told me my blood was honey and honey deserves
to be suckled

it told me
I could never be a fantasy
until I fantasized of dirt and weeds filling me, worms ******* me
and using my empty womb as a carousel

taunting me – “I’ll make babies
fall out of you just often enough
you will start to believe you could love them
if only they’d stay”

and now
pearl strings of *** spiral down my abdomen like
small intestines,

sticking and staining and staying.