JULIA COHEN

Someday You Will Be So Long

I put the wrong name on
so my ribs push in & a sound
appears like o0O0o0O0ooo
like falling off the tire swing

Someday you’ll be so long
Your body
It stretches it doesn’t
know how it got here

Tunnel running?
By the fur?

Blood in the meadow
To spill well
The black flowers like pinwheels
spin & rotate heat in their starry fists

Volatile alkali in your absence
I sleep next to the phone
Its whole body fits
on the pillow

The value of
this process lies
in the possibility
of checking

A name fitted to
your wooshing sound

Sleepers decrease
the classic movement
of a running dog

I have counted out
all the apples you will
ever eat & all the arms
to possibly swing you

And then the cliff
no one saw coming

Ground down
I sling pillows
over the spills

Invention of the Outside World

My face was curious
I looked up
the scientific purpose of revenge

Then the daffodilic
gave way to an uncertain moon
frost-pinched & antsy

Clouds as thought bubbles
Winter fall-out

Revenge stems from those who tire
of holding up
this enormous apple
Its fontanel the thumb-bruise

Twin wings
scuttling between a smoked limb
& the refrigerator house

Conch shell dentate, the doctor
of your heart-beat

I have a cabbage-head?
I am spewing blood?
You vultures, at this point you
should know better

Culture is the option to
choose not to die
An atonal umbrella

Ivory dominoes
stored in a lunchbox
when it pours

Sad Paint

a bird-covered tree—
what kind of person I am

sirens crash through the pines
like a painting of a girl

kneeling in corners

hostage to hanging clouds
I hide my pills in

the clock I hear yet can’t spot

my crust of bread points at you
like an index finger

to calendar the brush drying
against my cheek

of ants logging the insect home
of bangs balancing on eyelids

three prongs of a shadow relent
the descent to wriggle loose

okay so I don’t want a sad
painting watching over us

BIO

JULIA COHEN is the author of Triggermoon Troggermoon (Black Lawrence, 2011). Her work appears in journals like jubilat, Colorado Review, and New American Writing. She is the Associate Editor of the Denver Quarterly.