the earth has an exquisite hum

I can hear it when I put my ear to the bark of an aspen. I can hear it in the way worms flow. I can hear it as my tongue licks the power line. It tells me that everything will be alright. That my mother is not waiting for me. That nothing I do will ever be enough. That my father is gone. That it was all worth it. That deep inside its molten heart is a small child eating a golden apple. That nobody remembers what happened to me in seventh grade. That time will never tell. That I am the moon and the stars and the dirt and the piss. That your scars exist because they are scars. That everything everyone has ever said is true and devastating. I can hear it when I grind rock between my teeth. I can hear it when I hold my daughter’s hand and she whispers with her fists. I can hear it when I finally slip away and for once there is nothing anyone can do to stop me.

there’s still a little piece of you inside me

He shows up as deep purple on the x-ray, about the size of a cow’s hoof, nestled under my spleen. Has the tiniest hint of a southern accent, as if he grew up in Tuscaloosa, went to study comparative literature at NYU and never looked back. Takes his coffee black, over-clicks his pen when doing the crossword, makes outrageous excuses for innocuous mistakes. I once caught him leering at the neighbors while they made their furious love, tongue lolling out the side of his mouth like spent reels of film stock, his tiny brow moistening with every outrageous moan. I’m constantly taking him on walks, his thick neck tangled up in a leash of burnished horse leather dotted with rusted railroad spikes. It’s the only way I’ve been able to get another woman to talk to me since you left. When they bend down to pet his oily coat, his fur clings to their fingers like rain.

yesterday an ice cream truck was swept out to sea

I watched the current cradle it, rock it with patient arms, tuck it away beyond salted swells. The driver, a chowder-faced man in a pink speckled vest, perched himself atop its bobbing hull, buffaloed by the stampeding surf. A phalanx of children marched to pillage its treasure, each youth’s reflection more grotesque than the last. A fishmonger offered to sell me a rainbow perch he swore tasted like butterscotch ripple. As the truck dissolved behind a melted copper sun, I crunched down in a chair of cheap teal mesh, its rusted bones tearing through my callous skin. Seagulls fashioned a double helix through the herringbone sky. When I woke, the truck had slipped beneath the tide, the children swallowed by the hunger of the bluest waves. 





Ben Starr studied poetry in college and as part of the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Bending Genres, Bruiser, Dishsoap Quarterly, HAD, Maudlin House, Gone Lawn, Scaffold, and other journals.

Website | Twitter