Picaroon Poetry - Issue #1 - March 2016
Picaroon Poetry is a new web journal for rogue poems. Issue #1 includes work by Orooj-e-Zafar, iDrew, Shane Vaughan, David Spicer, Susan Castillo Street, Neil Fulwood, Brett Evans, Amy Kinsman, Dean Rhetoric, Johanna Boal, Carole Bromley, Alyson Miller, Robert Crisp, Chris Hemingway, Rachel Nix, Jennifer A. McGowan, Bethany W Pope, Grant Tarbard, Hannah Pyne, Marilyn Hammick, and Mary Stone.
Picaroon Poetry is a new web journal for rogue poems.
Issue #1 includes work by Orooj-e-Zafar, iDrew, Shane Vaughan, David Spicer, Susan Castillo Street, Neil Fulwood, Brett Evans, Amy Kinsman, Dean Rhetoric, Johanna Boal, Carole Bromley, Alyson Miller, Robert Crisp, Chris Hemingway, Rachel Nix, Jennifer A. McGowan, Bethany W Pope, Grant Tarbard, Hannah Pyne, Marilyn Hammick, and Mary Stone.
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What’s Thirty-Two and Eight?<br />
Amy Kinsman<br />
I am Girl #32.<br />
He is Boy #8.<br />
The count, for him, is summoned instantly to mind<br />
the numerals climbing like an ever growing mountain<br />
its features changing each occasion you should look back<br />
at the landmarks made insignificant,<br />
just specks in the distance marking where you were.<br />
I will get there too, in time,<br />
and to say it started tonight would be a lie<br />
just as I will be the lie of omission he does not tell<br />
to the elephant in the room just outside of London.<br />
What number does he give her?<br />
Is it honest, as it may as well be,<br />
for we are fixed points to one another’s movement?<br />
Once you begin to add cinnamon and oranges<br />
and the bite of tequila,<br />
presumption is just simple mathematics.<br />
What’s thirty-two and eight?<br />
A question free of nuance that opens up its arms<br />
to an easy answer<br />
on a sheet of primary school homework:<br />
fill in what’s missing.<br />
He does not tell me I have beautiful thighs<br />
or not to reference my own poems in my poetry.<br />
He does not prise my fingers from my face<br />
and wraps his arms about me like this<br />
is where his body always fits.<br />
So I tell him about six,<br />
how the number brands me and still aches<br />
because the mark goes deep<br />
and we exchange these numbers in the gap<br />
between mouth and ear:
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