Contributor: Alyssa Nickerson

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I.

There’s a frigid force behind your directionless escapades.
A tidbit of scheme, malice, design – the manufactured magnanimity folded
in your filed pleats fills the aisles. Unintentional and partial, a tepid following haunts
the forked riverbed. Review the ruckus rendered less candid by purposeful distance.

Part man, part deity – hands melded to guitar and grilled cheese (unmade) –
shakes grace from cacao mane (perched haphazard, poignant in silhouette pose).
A debonair allegiance to ambivalence invokes exotic penumbras like inverted dust;
an innate tattoo to recycle a breath spent sucking on pleated flesh.

Tongue flicks itself over and under frills and folds,
through feral forest, the dry pine needles
now faded to shades of cinnamon.

II.

Don’t believe me yet, but you (as curator) held quite a stash of cures.

III.

I saw your sinews shake.
I made your muscles grind, boy.
I filled your taut latex flesh until it could hold
no more rapture. And I saw those vibrations too,
the undulation absent only from boudoir eyes.

I savored the tip-tap-flicking of your avid
tongue and I tasted with relish (eventually devoured)
the slightly-curdled effusions you allowed escape.

I saw things you perhaps did not see – or saw and abandoned:
a capacity for love, or at least
an honest and aimless devotion –
these things you cast aside
like half-used condom, clammy
as neurotic’s palms and pockets.

I saw truth, as I am wont to do.

IV.

Muse, we both knew your prerogative
or the inquiry would not have halted
hands bequeathed to demons at will of impulse
and idiotic lust. I see myself now a whore. Used.
A one-night-stand? A filthy concept. An inspiration
left unanswered – unpenned, unpinned, unexcavated nor even
explored. An instinctive call to intrigue, insidiously ignored.

V.

Don’t believe the wayside advice;
most of all, that bullshit about epiphanies.

Say what you will about elegance, their poise, and
that elusive element of denied perfection –
results of expanding an all-too-enlarged mind.

We know:
found ecstasy fades in a flash,
like Superman in a cage
with nothing left to do but masturbate
to thrice-folded photographs of nymphettes
who laugh at your sacred curves and protrusions
(sweet to taste, with afterglow of old resignation).

VI.

Promise me anything, so
long as the layers keep peeling
like the skin on your swimmer’s body –
I could not forget! Such sensation, the tickling
thought-trains, the trite terms entertained for not long enough.

I saw things worth a glance, worth a fevered fumbling fuck or two,
and I will, in cyclical nature, see more than I should:
more than the lies you spewed in ink (a melody I mistook for mine).

In that, I saw the absurdity of naked confession booths
and polygraph ribbons hanged by your inexplicable trills
and the rhythm you cannot yet decipher,
a less vapid way with words.

I see now your affinity for duplicity.

I saw revolutions
you will never ignite.


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Alyssa Nickerson is the product of wonder and wanderlust. She was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and plans to move to Georgia to study writing at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She has been published in Word Riot, VAYAVYA, Poetry Quarterly, Camel Saloon (including Editor's Choice), Eunoia Review, Downer Magazine, and other journals.