Free Pretzels
a man excuses himself from the intimacy
of spending seconds in my space
space is relative this high and
pressure is cabinated
we are explaining ourselves
formally and boxlike
and my hat has a bill that cages
my sightline like a hand arced
for cover. i have paid for access
to a rectangle of space. i tilt
my rectangle backwards
parallelogramlike
i am in control
of whether this man may relieve
himself in an irregular shape
of a room. whoosh
fluids go somewhere no one
knows (our pilot incidentally
late a tiny god called forth
to hurtle people, dogs
through space as fast as
possible commercially
full throttle navigation
button activation
peering down at blips
in the abyss below
cranking levers backwards
halting bodies and metal
from motion)
objects in mirror
are really really close
Mysterious Refrigerator
someone is sneaking into my basement
and turning off my heat. the heat becomes
cold. i am a person predisposed
to coldness. i shake with it.
a lover buys me slippers.
upon being plugged in they glow
supernaturally warm. this is the sort
of supernatural phenomenon in which
I am interested. albert camus
said something about autumn.
how it is “a second spring
when every leaf is a flower.”
i learned this quote from a leaflet
sent to me in the mail. it is possible
this quote has been misattributed
or even manufactured. it might be
supernatural. flowers and leaves
seem to fulfill different roles.
just because i happen
to be cold i am not
preparing to fall down. collapse
is not always imminent. obviously.
i am uninterested in heroic journeys
or what it means to fly overhead.
who is tunneling into my basement?
flowers in ice water
they say, live to bloom
longer
-
Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo is an MFA candidate at Rutgers University-Camden, where she has recently written about deer, hand models, and trees. She is the author of the chapbook "DUH" (Bullshit Lit), and her work appears or is forthcoming in Passages North, Barrelhouse Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, and Bedfellows Magazine, among others. She can be followed @tall.spy (Instagram) and @tall__spy (Twitter) but she can never be caught.