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Poetry by Jessica Heron

normal life is lossy

bad is so bad but good is bad too

i want to tell you i love you before the collapse

i want to tell you i love you before the endings

always on the heels of my wins…



this is how it goes, this is why i buy sky blue platforms for nowhere

mint green heels, red florals, fuschia/peach/gold, and so it goes… four inches higher

dressed up as hope in feathers, leopard prints, loud coats and nails –

the good is acrylic and i get jealous of clarity, i’m sorry –



this is why i use that email signature quote, it goes the other way too…

i sure do know this but you… my goodness, you are so good!

do you even know about lossness? loss and pre-loss and post-loss,

loss-within-loss and loss/gain/loss and glossain?



i want to tell you about it without pulling you down

to jealousy and the drag of hope,

what’s waiting in the wings…



yes of course i treasure every metallic glint in stone, every sparkling pearl,

every ha in hahaha from out of your mouth, every shining instant, every bright thing

swallowed quick into darkness, i do



i do! what great luck of nature! to learn so much going one way then the other



but when i was a balloon the wind changed and i can see how it might be hard for you

to understand but let me tell you i love you without accusations around purity

and let me feel love without knowledge, please, love without its shadows, for tonight, love,

let me tell you that i love you and i am a balloon at a dangerous height, from here

i see everything which is love and what love is is terrifying but i’ll come back down,

pulled down and jealous and i’ll do my nails and i’ll buy more shoes

the thin veil

sometimes there enters here

the snake, the squirrel in the wall in winter, the gasoline from sprawling lawncare workers

a little like ants through hills if ant technology was as terrible as human



sometimes here enters there

i think this is what tinnitus is

turning up the volume on burial sound or the sound of space without our helmets on



there’s a sucking-in-ness to it a little bit like imploding, it sucks then it explodes

spreading detritus in all directions, mostly plastic like helmets and gasoline canisters



but today i will bring it there. i mean here. i mean it.

it will bring it here. there. oh, i don’t know!

no matter, matter doing what matter does…



like how gasoline comes visible through the nose and the sprawling ants snort and shake

and crawl through the velvet fuzz layer of protection over everything, a little like cilia,

as in eyelashes, as in i know something you don’t know! i see it before it happens,

laid out like a lawn: the ants dig around your prized tomatoes, dead, the grass

having been oversaturated then dried up from unpredictable storms and suns,

this back and forth prying open the cracks



like how the cracked spaces cough up dessicated little worms and stems a little like my

little skeleton, thin pink skin having gone so slack it slacked completely off and finally!

dry bones and no appetites! no more tomato sandwiches, byebye tomatoes!



byebye smells byebye squirrels byebye winter byebye walls byebye sounds byebye suns byebye

lawns byebye humans byebye space no no wait! byebye ants! byebye fungus!

byebye gasses byebye lashes byebye workers byebye snakes byebye plastics byebye stems byebye bones

hello tinnitus

Jessica Heron

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