Intro to a new audio series of my poetry.

Intro to Poetry Audio Series

I keep looking at this picture.

You're standing next to a box full of mangoes
and a nearby sign says in bold

SQUEEZE
GENTLY

and your bottom lip is pursed
and your eyebrow is raised
and I remember so clearly

that day.

It was our first trip anywhere without Herbert.
My mom watched him at home while we,
alone for the first time in months, went to
a Target to shit-talk their
Starbucks.

I saw the mangoes and I asked you to stand there.
You obliged, made that face,
said, "You're dumb", and kissed me after.

How often and easy you fit our surroundings.
How I joked that your coffee kisses were okay
so you should kiss me again
to help keep me awake.

How I wish I could go back to that exact moment
and squeeze you
as hard as I
could.

Squeeze Gently

I am drinking.
I don't like the eyebrows on bartenders before noon.
That dumb little 'if-you-say-so' wiggle
as my yellowbelly exercises its only right.
Boobytrap the bartop if it means so much to you.
You only scare off bums with that kind of jewelry,
and I, with exactly $27 for the occasion,
don't mind keeping my elbows off
the table.

I am drinking alone.
I've reached for my phone a dozen times.
Husbands. Fathers. Men that mean the whole damn world
to someones I'll never meet, or worse,
someones who consider(ed) me their friend.
Men who wouldn't know what it meant to protect
if their dicks were billyclubs and their wives were
mouthy thieves.
I start to text a nice boy who would be glad
that I thought to invite him
but
there is nothing I hope to achieve.
He isn't a drink or 27 more dollars.
He is smart, but he isn't Too smart.
I mean.
He wouldn't understand why my elbows must stay
off this get-a-job table.

I am drinking alone and my body is a library.
There's a gross misconception that I'm educated.
That my library houses all of the greats,
and wouldn't I like to discuss them.
No. I tell you now that this place was curated
by someone who must have had to bury a spouse,
or a child, or a parent long before their time.
The books that fill my body don't resemble
anything anyone'd want to read.

Unless you'd like to know the exact moment when
I realized I loved (you) so
completely.

There's a whole wing dedicated
to that.

facing the sun, chasing the fun

I am sitting in an Urgent Care.

I am sitting in an Urgent Care
and before they can tend to my stupid wound,
the nurse has to ask if there's Any chance
at all
that I might be

pregnant.

And I crack the same pendulous joke,
"Well you have to have sex to get pregnant, right?"

and it scrapes the sides of my mouth coming out
like some empty plastic tube long since
absent of its own
juice, but it

Always.
Gets a. fuckin
La.ugh.

My left hand, now Comically covered
in blood,
exhales in a huff and I swear
it's a woman.
My hand is a woman and her wound is her party dress
and she didn't want to come to this
lame ass office gig,
but now we're both here, and I've got the nerve
to ignore her and flirt with the nurse
instead??

She gives me three shots of
lidocaine
and four

stitches.

The tetanus shot holds that my hand cheated
first.

fruit hung low, brow held high

I am sitting at my mother's favorite intersection.
Hulking Tweety Bird eyes the dive around the corner.
I have work today, but he stares anyways.
"We're on sabbatical," Elephant warns,
"it isn't right to break promises.
Least of all

to
God."

Squid keeps fidgeting in his car seat.
His forefront restless legs pull my hair
through the bottleneck gap
in the headrest.
Stop it, I tell everyone.
Squid kicks in defiance.
Hulking Tweety Bird suggests
we turn this goddamned
car

around.

"We can sit if that will make everyone happy.
We can sit, but we will not drink.
Agreed?"

Nobody
agrees.

I arrive at the bar
a yearslong

ringless
circus.

They are busy and nobody,
not even elephant,
cares very much

for crowds.

Hulking Tweety Bird states the obvious -
we could drink and nothing
worse

than what was already going to happen

will
happen.

Squid agrees.
Elephant hangs
his exhausted elephant
head.

I look at the three of them
and wonder which one
God will pretend he had nothing to do
with.

A waitress appears.

"I'm Trish, what can I get started for you?"

And I appear to order water,
though I can't hear too well.
The elephant trumpets gladness
while the others,
like self-conscious boys courting women,
ceaselessly offer

boos.

Observance

I'd like to be forgotten, please.
It'd be the most convenient thing.
Forget I ever was and then
forget we ever were, again.
I'd like to be dismembered, please.
Izzat the opposite of 'membered?
Just scratch my name off of your tongue,
put memories in catapults and fling them where
non-things get flung.
I'd like to be erased, that's all.
It shouldn't take too long.
Everyone I love is dead, except for you
and so I guess
you'll have to do this pretty soon
cause I'm all done with fear and death
and panic haunting every room.
So start right now! Let Brittany go.
Feel all things Brit receding.
You're almost there. Just one last thing -
this stupid shit you're reading.

tell the artist to draw a cool kid, hat backwards, thumb down, and add a ptthhbbbt sound

On Plain Language
In a dire emergency, all radio users are encouraged to forego 10-codes and adopt plain language. This ensures first responders from other departments, some out of city, some out of state, who may use different 10-codes in their respective environments, will understand what is being said and limit confusion, expediting emergency response.

A Snake
The cats brought me a snake today. They're not my cats. Who knows whose snake. 6 inches in length, of this, I am certain. Not dead, but certainly not doomed to live. A curious show of force, I thought. Discarding, disguising choked crow bones as gifts. I aided its dying and left it near sunlight. I seem to recall that coldblooded things like that.

Language on a Snake
I can understand Adam insofar as I'm willing to understand Eve. Wanting a thing, and wanting it badly. Tempted to damn people I'll never meet for a taste of what bobs in the throats of good men. It is a vile thing, harming snakes without killing. Hunting prey without eating. Leaving poetry writhing on the front steps of death and calling it 'a gift'.

Snake on a Plain
All of this...all of this so I could make the most unfunny reference on the planet? There's no point in maintaining rhythm. Ya caught me.
That's a big
10-
4.

Ouroboros

The wood asps have returned to my workplace.
Course, I ain't never been stung by nothin',
no bee, nor wasp, nor Colonel Mustard stachepillar,
but avoiding them feels like a harm(ed)less presumption.

As opposed to assumption,
which lacks any evidence.
For instance,

I've never eaten ice as the sun was setting,
but I assume the rave rays of deep dusk glowing through
every cube
would taste like a grape
jolly rancher.

Presumptions, I believe, require some knowledge
of how things involved can be known to
behave.

Like.

I've never run my hands up your back
and set them to rest on your shoulders,
but I know me well enough to presume
that I would not, could not resist the temptation
to squeeze your deltoids and call them
ovaries.

Umptions And One More U - Word

I'd like to write your portrait.
More specifically, I'd like to take note of the shape
your hands make when holding
a fresh cup of coffee.
If your palm cups the mug like a mother with child.
If you prefer to keep grip with floaty fingertips,
letting the palm stick its head out the window.
If your middle and thumb curtsy around the rim,
appearing, then, like a hot air balloon.
I could guess, but I would be wrong.
You might not like
coffee
at all.

But I'd like to write your portrait, still.
(pardon that bit of
redundance)

Pining For Portrait #8

wait for an open door
see who runs
reward stay-at-home
see who runs

Wait For An Open Door Rettig Mix.m4a

Feel like I'm stuck in the past
And more often find myself looking back
On when things were easy
But now life's completely
Upside down
I live alone
Alone lives with me
Cling to my phone
Hoping I'll see
Some place to go
Or someone to meet
I live alone
On Loneliness Street
El barco se hunde en el mar
Y con el se va el capitán con su gorra
No tengo a nadie
Extraño a mi madre
Más y más
I live alone
Alone lives with me
Cling to my phone
Hoping I'll see
Some place to go
Someone to meet
I live alone
On Loneliness Street

- Nico Play

Loneliness Street (Nico Play cover)

i.
The sky is falling! said the human to a room of identical humans.
And they cheered and the message was preached rather loudly;
all identical humans in their homes got word
and they cheered in their identical houses.
They printed flyers and marched in the streets.
Some even called their high school buddies.
And across the world,
where the sky had fallen,
they died without knowing
how much they were thought of.

ii.
WELL WHAT DOES THAT MAKE YOU - one shouted.
At me, I presume, though the room took offense.
YOU'RE A NOBODY! AT LEAST WE CARE!
And the room grew very quiet. And very loud. And very angry.
And very tired. And very frightened
of how meaningless it was -
a fist fight in a room where no one was dying.
And those who had died
thought nothing of
who won.

iii.
Can't you agree that coping is a tool.
Humans water their stupid hopes with it.
Well. Those humans do. Those other ones die.
And no one will save them.
And that is the point that I'm beating to death.
And That death is unimportant, too.
In fact, the only deaths who matter are those
we cannot stop
from dying

like this.

Brittany M. Ortega

Pinned to spotlight

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