People who carry suitcases
By Carolyn Gevinski

 

People who carry suitcases
also appreciate pigeons
and skeletons of townhouses
set against an afternoon sun.

 

They have cinnamon-colored freckles,
almost no personal belongings,
and always forget their chargers
whose necks are wire and bruised.

 

Travelers married to the skies
enjoy the comic of religion
and find their prayers endearing,
plastered to grandmother’s walls.

 

My runaway with his suitcase
leaves me scripted candy rings
and folded German newspapers,
which lift my eyes to the sky.

 

 

The Soft Ones

 

Am I writing songs for you, poet?
My boundary breaker, not tectonic shifter—graft rifter—
type of way, but a slow unravel.

 

A tickling shoreline at amber dusk type of way.
Field of Anne’s lace I don’t deserve.

 

We are taken out by catastrophic
big bang forces
Fine line tattoos in the earth's crust.

 

But the point is
we existed.
We died pale, lived softly
as the sea foam

 

 

Carolyn Gevinski is from the US, and her poems have been published in Lavender Review and are forthcoming in Scapegoat Review. Her journalism can be found in El País, GLAMOUR, Grassroots Magazine, Al Jazeera, and Out Magazine. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School, where she currently works on their postgraduate investigative team.