Poet: Christie Ann Reynolds, Brooklyn, NY
Smalldoggies Poetry Feature #13: Christie Ann Reynolds, Brooklyn, NY
Palace and Intelligentsia Poems
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Questions About the Weather Result in a Fear of Being Alone
What’s public about nature is what it's like outside on a day of rain. What it's like
outside, and when people tuck through the prey of their cottony cells, rich in
flavanoids and intelligentsia. Intervals of wetness escape the atmosphere, collect in
clouds. The sun shears them open with a murmur and behold, the rain. Sometimes,
what its like outside is relevant to our conversations to tucking my fingers into your
cheek and tapping on your head with your ears plugged is the best way to hear
yourself breathe. Luke sent the goddamned intelligentsia to my house for telling you
how to hear your own breathing. As if the kitchen wasn’t the most private place to
thoughtfully scramble what is mostly silent. If I were an old lady, what it would be
like outside is a whisper and the deeper flow of a cycle from the moon-tide to the
neck sphere to the abdomen of women to the clavicle space that sits between her
hips. I am secure in this rhythm. And Bartholomew gives me his hand. He knows I
have become afraid of the livingroom when it is too quiet.
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About August, As If It Never Gets That Hot
Another thing about the weather is that everyone has a weather dream that never
involves insecticide or the northern lights or even the socialist behavior I was
accused of when I tried to belong to the phenomena of beasts of girls that beat me
up in middle school. Or another day it snows and your father feels complete because
he can shovel the walkway in silence. Silence, that deep white silence that occurs in
the snow. It is evident in the bathroom when you shower—a silence like a luxurious
shadow animated by sweat and mosquitoes. Wishing on a star was similar to
pocketing a religious craziness about how the sky convinces the human race it isn’t
alone. Its like eating a sardine and with your tongue, separating salt molecules from
scales or filling an orange autumn squash with motor grease and throwing it at the
intelligentsia.
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Delinquent Palace
She said the palace was there
I mistook nothing for everything
It was absurd to meet
Unfettered joy?
A gutter hanging loose is just as idealistic
She said it was there
Irony shmirony
A shoe is a shoe is a shoe
So much despair on the television
But I’m aching to be a horse
Or be skinny
What was it that you said back there?
The air?
The air?
Thin air, the air is thin
Then there’s the problem with money
It is everywhere
And scarce
Those television shows
Where the men nearly die
Of thirst at the base of saguaro
That’s what I’d like to own
A circumference too small
To tell
Whether it is the light of god coming for me
Or the pupil closing out into a cone
She said it was there and I believed her
This stupid palace
You call it what—a dream without sleeping?
I say that’s fucking un-incredible
There's a sentence in every glare
In a glance
I can tell how you aren’t feeling
About last night’s approximate moon
It was waning
But the moon is so boring
We aren’t really talking about the moon
I am a constellation too
I sit on the bus next to old fat men
I think of their folds
I want to tuck my fingers into one of them
My hands are cold
And the wheels on the bus
They go round and round
I said she said it was there
I wanted to be skinnier
The canoe in the river flipped
But we were clothed
And not fish
And not able to get to shore
I skipped the chandelier
I skipped having friends
I murdered everyone I loved
So no one can see me feel nothing
On Sylvia’s birthday
I baked a cake and put in the dishwasher
Appropriately the sun
Struck out like naked archers
She said it was there but I pierced
Through like ear holes
Through all my skinny holes
I could feel the heat
On my ribs
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Stupid Palace
No one
Gets off at the incinerator besides
The herons
I am a natural wonder, too
You see these legs
You have eyes
What do I have but snow
Coincidentally, the train tracks all turn into the horizon
An evening of plastic bags
Is a death wish
People use babies to incite fear
Because population growth is charted in pop songs
The dust is not wasted in the rain
But how then is something so simple,
Such as the intricacy of an arroyo bed
Overlooked
To live a serious life—
Why’s that a fucked up thing?
Every weekend I drink to arrive at a paradise,
Delinquent in all but solemnity
Then I rise out of that stupid palace
I think I should stop using animals
To replace my emotions
And just have emotions
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Imaginary Paradise of Palaces in a Dream or While Under the Influence
You believed in me
And my taiga.
The pretty girls nodded
Their heads in the wind.
I thought about having nothing
To say.
You prepped for a painting.
A breeze blew all of the summer-weight
Cups to the floor.
I stood in the way of winter,
My hot tits sizzling through
Tshirt after Tshirt.
Convinced
The body had its own equator.
There were so many letters.
The conquest
Of falling asleep.
There were people there from my high
School but I pretended
I did not know who they were.
Inside a flailing
Mind sleet becomes invisible.
I adjust the suspenders of a bad hangover.
I attended the same day
Three times in one day.
I knew it wasn’t time travel.
The seasons flew across.
The trees kept their leaves and I stepped
Out of my prepped coffin.
But it wasn’t because I died a few times.
No, it isn’t like anything you are imagining.
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Christie Ann Reynolds has an MFA in Poetry from The New School. She is the author of three chapbooks: idiot heart (New School University Chapbook Competition), Girl Boy Girl Boy (The Corresponding Society) and Revenge Poems (Supermachine.)
Christie Ann teaches writing at Hofstra University and is a co-curator of the poetry reading series at Goodbye Blue Monday in Brooklyn. Her work is forthcoming or can be found in Barrelhouse, Big Lucks, BlazeVox, LIT, Sink Review and others.