fantasy: buying myself flowers

i am at the grocery store, because i am on

a budget. my eyes adjust to fluorescent
overhead lights as they sync their buzzing

with my tinnitus. i pass over the dyed-blue
roses, remembering the time i chuckled
over an arrangement gifted to a friend.

it’s almost valentine’s day. a velveteen
blanket of pinks and purples greets me

to the left of cyan artifice. i gently cup

a bleeding heart with my hand, soften
fingertips with its magenta silk. i may not

forgive every lover, but i can forgive
the universe. i can forgive the winds
of fate when they choose to move me.

poem for raisins in the sun

i don’t need to defer dreams for mine to shrivel like the skin of a sphynx. i wear all of my caveats on the surface and yet still am told i do not come as advertised—needs too unmet, wants too swollen. listen, i’m not perfect. i have the so-called irish temper, and my sobs can echo for miles. a lover once taught me to suck the marrow out of life; i am licking and licking, taut muscle of curlicued tongue to porous bone. nothing yet.

you need human touch

co–star says so this morning, and so thinks everyone

else i know. over four hundred days and i beg

for hugs, resent the absence of kisses. he leaves

and i cry. i spread all the salt in my body across

bamboo sheets, then i cry again. when i imagine

a finger tracing the bones in my shoulder, my stomach

is sure to turn. intimacy makes me want to stretch

my vocal cords to their outer limit, scream with so

much gusto that even the trees shudder. touch me

and i weep. love me and i decompose. a hand would

bore a hole through me in seconds.  





nat raum is a disabled artist, writer, editor, and genderless disaster based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. Past and upcoming publishers of their writing include Split Lip Magazine, Poetry Online, Baltimore Beat, Poet Lore, beestung, and others. 

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