Three Poems

by Michelle Dove

Astonished Yre Still Here 

after that time u came over
and I baked the soup too candidly
and I didn’t apologize, just let 
the room praise it. In the morning, we were entirely 
defiant, before we let someone with 
a toothache say, It's all a little out of my way,
and believed them. Now, we don’t believe 
what anyone wasn’t ever going to do anyway.
Can’t trick the relatively sober! we paint on the 
shed so the finches can see. Nature is a better 
witness than the parts of us hardly looking 
for trouble. That was the era we played 
paintball by drawing cards and doing 
the moves the cards said. You were always 
raising the danger bar, putting on the lipstick 
all wrong, taking yr look to the unlimited hot.
All they're going to do is look anyway, yre still good 
at saying. Let's at least give them a show.

Astonished Yre Still Here 

when We’re gonna need a new used engine		
was what I said to the cute person repeatedly 
phoning us in our dreams. Let’s stop entering 
atriums with our bodies dependent on artful statues
and contorted, ok? Yre easy at listening 
beneath the neighbor’s trees. That’s u 
under seventy branches, knowing yre covered energetically 
by the multicolor of solar lights u staked 
in my yard. I take ninety-nine strands 
of vitamins and ask every dirt mound, Are u here 
to be liked, or to be loud? We could prolly earn 
more money in our nightly dreams if we 
put the scare tropes in a bucket and tighten 
the lid. Ha-haha, who’s the comedian now, buddy? 
We’re always hearing the weather scrape the window.
We’re always stepping inside our lower nature and saying 
things like, I should’ve worn a different belt! 
Even the green leaves are always 
dropping in our direction saying, Do u sometimes 
forget to use yr language? And it’s true. 
We’re swollen in the pre-dream.
We’re gonna need to empty better
that funny language bumping about our heads
if we want our dreams differently.

Astonished Yre Still Here 

since once u were known 
for saying, We’re all getting promoted! 
I pulled the Seven of Pentacles from 
a crater of distance and reset every stupid year.
I posted the videos of us misusing kitchen 
appliances. We streamed wherever anyone 
also petted kittens. Back then, we often forgot 
we were trying out anything. We couldn’t see where 
anything went. We never asked, What happens when 
a go-to menu item disappears? We lay only 
in dry grass when the air was oppressively 
strange, the weight of existence clinging us together.
I talk to layers all the time, I was always saying.
You never know what’s in the transparency.
The street of ex-boyfriends made some cities 
less appealing. We moved and it felt like 
anything else. Oh honey, u didn’t grow up 
with plants in the house, did u? yre still good 
at asking me. And I bet yr parents hardly 
took u to nature. 

                            (same)

Michelle Dove is the author of Radio Cacophony and writing that appears in Chicago Review, Entropy, Hobart, DIAGRAM, and Maggot Brain. By day, she works in the English Department at Duke University, where she also teaches creative writing. By night, she co-runs the record label SPINSTER, creates electro-poetry with Streak of Tigers and drums with Ex Iguana.

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