Maya Miracle Gudapati
The Dreamworld Radicalizes
with a line from Lorca
Oh, beautiful for spacious
summer. Staring into your good eye
through a brushfire.
You found me
at the wrong time. Ash caked
beneath fingernails, even after
scrubbing for minutes, which feel
like hours. I’ve tried
the whole picket-
fence thing. Turned out to be
a coping mechanism.
I’ve tried to write
verse in the airport, tried
Kundalini Yoga, volunteered
at the equine therapy farm, signed up
for meal trains. Nothing satiates the thirst,
the deficiency. I read and read
about the wars, about hometown smoke-
jumpers who pass
away. Look,
I want to fall into sexual embrace
with you on the hills behind my childhood
home, I do. Stained
knees. Lorca’s green. Verde
que te quiero verde.
If not for these amber waves
of cheatgrass. Incendiary,
invasive grief.
. ~ . ~ . ~
Tell me, how
old were you
when you woke in the night
and could not hear
frogs croaking beneath the patio furniture?
In last night’s dream
color drained from flowers.
Staring at the hillside
through a slit in the city
Jeff Koons’s Puppy looked
like a family dog. Greyscale. Obedient. Thistle seed
in nasal passage, dove
feathers in the teeth. I find myself
more and more winded while
walking to work. Twenty-five:
the year the body
they say, starts to age. Build muscle or else
Alzheimer’s. Or maybe I’ll piss myself
when I’m sixty. No Social Security
to boot, but I’ve known it would run out
all along. How old were you
when the nightmares started
to recur? When your lover stopped returning
your calls? When you forgot
that a flag could make a pleasant sound?
Sh-wish, sh-wish, sh-wish—
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Image by Maycon Marmo
Maya Miracle Gudapati (she/they) is a biracial bisexual poet born and raised in Boise, ID. She co-coordinates the Incarcerated Writers Project through Phoebe Journal. Their writing can be found or is forthcoming in Peach Fuzz Magazine, Sky Island Journal, OROBORO Literary Journal, and elsewhere. Find her through www.mayamiraclegudapati.com or on Instagram @thatdamngudapati
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