Even edges don’t even out when
all we‘ve ever known was the plague.
I can’t recall a time when war
wasn’t looming over our heads.
The cathode rays of the T/V set
I was married to xxx as a child,
showing me stories full of rockets in the sky
that would soon rain down and kill us all.
Commercials for Comet cleaner – powder form
and course on my fingers – imagine the grains on their lips.
I’m not alive enough to listen to old men rattle on
about all the sour saccharine they shoot in their veins.
The sound of gravel voices leave rattled wounds
inside my skull, replace my eardrums with rocks.
So what do we do about all these hostages
we keep locked up in the fucking asylum?
What do we do when we refuse to stop the saddists
that point new rockets at other children’s heads?
When the babies are not ours do we wake up
and worry or prepare our torches to burn?
m.e. gamlem is a non-binary queer writer from New Mexico. They are a MFA candidate in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. Their work most recently appears or is forthcoming in The Potomac Review, Mouth Full of Salt, ANARKISS, Dogwater, and Screen Door Review.
find them at
https://substack.com/@megamlem666
Instagram: @megamlem
https://www.chillsubs.com/profile/megamlem666
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Picture Credits: Musa Ali Chaudhry
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