|||

poetry by nat raum

beaver dam run or laurel hill

imagine you are in the teal house in seven springs with the back deck and hot tub and the papered panels of gaudy floral print on off-white, the same kind of walls your childhood bedroom had when your family moved to the valley. pretend there’s a season in the air besides dread and wind chill, that a skin-scalding bath two hundred miles away could still seep you into its chlorine steam and suddenly you’re back at summer camp in your beloved swamptown, all humidity and green streaks in your sunswept young hair. admit that you’d still rather sit in the shade with your cobalt blue gameboy bleating secret agent barbie beats. cough smoke from the spliff in your fingertips like you coughed your way out of sports camp the third consecutive summer that your airways met tree pollen and revolted. imagine the pillows of moss strewn across forest floor right now, and the crickets that chime in the underbrush as you breathe straight through the crisp air and scattered steam on the mountainside. run away in your mind like this and you may have the courage to leave home someday in search of somewhere else’s senseless weather patterns—for months or years, however long will satisfy the part of you that never really got to leave the valley. however long it takes to finally drop yourself back into its steamed-crab summers when you think of escape.

nat raum

Twitter: @gr8earlofhell
IG: @gr8earlofhell

Up next Nonfiction: "Yelp Review of My Father's Funeral" A Valentine's Day Interview with Muscle by Kelly Xio
Latest posts "There is a Flame Called the Endless Night" by Juliette Sandoval "Gigantopedia" by Alexander Gradus Review: Smog Mother by John Wall Barger Spring Break Scene Report [Anything for a Weird Life] Two poems by Rob Kempton "Series in Which My Body is Not My Body" by Arden Stockdell-Giesler "Rows of Jaw Bones and Worn Down Teeth" by C. Morgenrede Two prose poems by Howie Good from "Founders' Day" by Arzhang Zafar Social Media and its Discontents [Anything for a Weird Life] "Jubilee" by Damon Hubbs "Nothing to See Here" by Bernard Reed Three poems by Kimberly Swendson In Praise of Phantomime [Anything for a Weird Life] Two stories by Robert John Miller Review: Greetings from Marquette: Music from Joe Pera Talks With You Season 2 by Skyway Man "Holiday" by Serena Devi Two poems by Jordan James Ranft How to Write a Song [Anything for a Weird Life] BRUISER ZINE 003: Founders' Day by Arzhang Zafar "March Madness" by Parker Wilson "At Hirschmann Hospital" by Jan E. Stanek "I Have Never Made More than Seventy Five Dollars" by John Ling Tape World: The Six O'Clock Alarm S/T "Greetings from the Milky Way" by Bethany Cutkomp Three poems by Jordan Blanchard Suffer Well, Rejoice Better with Bruce Springsteen, Pt. II [Praise Music for a Secular Life] A Return to the Arbutus Record Show [Anything for a Weird Life] Two poems from CUTTING PROMOS by Josh Shepard "It Just Feels Good to be Honest" by Carson Jordan Two prose poems by Tim Frank