abbie hart

shooing lily-minds gauzed, embroiled, skimps.

practiced procedure and roped-up

sorrow-girl (fourteen years old)’s date

excavate the accurate eventually

but skip it for four years.

warfare follows, thought it would relieve but it didn’t.

i wander to work drop-jawed and cold

and come back drop-jawed and colder

it is difficult to trust old men when you

bartend as they tend to shit themselves

which is never particularly fun

especially when you are going to bed

in a state that is 1820 miles from home

and you’ve just witnessed bare ass

human feces

on the fucking floor.

text my mom even though i probably shouldn’t

makes me think too much

and she sends me videos of a possum eating

as if i am not right here.

her very own possum

as if i have not been playing dead the whole time

waiting for the exact moment

to appear in the center of the road

and finally get my wish.

the borrows come along, and this time it is a candle, but last time it was an air freshener. a cacophony of things that smell disappearing from the pink tiled bathroom of a vietnamese restaurant in a college town. come may i am one of them.

for those of you who missed the summary of my book:

head is a home is a catalogue of all of the times Abbie Hart did not cry in the last two years. It is her debut chapbook, and clocks in at 24 strange poems that you could learn to love. To put it gently, it is about a house, and how to become one on your own terms. It is about how to treat yourself like a house. It is about how to like the house that you have become. It is about how to be soup. It is about how to be bread. It is about how to put both on the table and eat until you sob. 

you took me out into a field to see

what stars really look like when i 

came to new jersey. i am afraid i do

not have much to offer you that i 

have not already given. interlink

hands and look at the sewer. at the smog.

at the concrete structure rising in unison

along the edge of the sky. at my hands.

i will never see it,

never know that it is there.

but i will contemplate

phoning the fire

department.

i will imagine all of the things i will say to them

but when they answer

i will tell them only

to not let the new house burn

down

i will not always be alone here,

the house is barely here

and it is already collapsing.

when i finally call the fire department to beg them for help for my poor destroyed house,

and then the floorboards laid

themselves.

and then there was a cup of coffee on the counter.

the same way i cannot tell you where it hurts. i cannot remember.

i cannot remember. all i know is that one moment i was here.