Pebble mine
Butchy cut-offs
tough and tumbling,
denim board shorts
with no apparent port,
facing into it split-lipped
and sprung without pastor,
pier and tower, wet sand cycling rollers
coast into the channel,
down into a cluck,
ducking rivers, sun developed,
orange cone, vermillion cape,
hot pink shoelace, too.
If memory serves me not at all
to unpack open conflict –
my room just set up, waiting
there for me to crawl back
and have that there and
not a home. My speaking matters
some in scale and solipsism's
trail not bad but binned with crab
meat bloated to mess up the
need beyond my tail – who cares
what brought me – here –
brought here, too, a body
broken by being a bridge.
It becomes reusable and I should never
speak to anyone on a Thursday
when it's like that
squeeze of the hand:
opened up to hug each part
by touch alone. It can also be
very simply not intense
or shattering, like sex can.
A fear was growing in my heart.
The fear grew sharper,
drawn away to where
there was no sun, but a sense of
external accomplishment:
look what I burped into me.
All that activity spruced out
of a need I don't want to mine.
Samuel Solomon grew up in New York City and spent his twenties in Los Angeles before moving to the U.K., where he is Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. He completed a PhD on socialist-feminism and innovative U.K. poetry at the University of Southern California and is co-translator of The Acrobat: The Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin (Tebot Bach 2014). His essays, poems, and translations have appeared in a range of U.S. and U.K. journals, including differences, Décalages, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, htmlgiant, Hi Zero, and Lana Turner, and his chapbook, Life of Riley (2012), is available from Bad Press. He is Co-director of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence.
Read how Sam travels light HERE.