Forrest Rapier
Image by Xi Zhang
IG: @xi_zhang_artist
Forrest Rapier has poetry forthcoming in Dead Mule, Levee, South Carolina Review, and Willawaw. He has received fellowships from BOAAT, Looking Glass Falls, Sewanee Writers Conference, and has also held writing residencies at the University of Virginia and Brevard College. Former poetry editor for Greensboro Review and North Carolina Writers Network, he recently received his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where where he now lives and hikes the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains.
©2021 West Trade Review
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After the LSD Bliss Dissolves
the amethyst sharpens hyper-violet—hammer
semesters: chipping quartz and sketching lamps
beneath beer light with Lake, Leo, and Dakota.
Sometimes, it’s like pulling a sword from your chest,
chugging gasoline, then spitting fireballs out of your proof
lips—free-chiseling figures from a giant marblein a desert where foxes daze beneath saguaro shade.
Other times, it breaks across your body
like a multitude of seasick waves.
Shaggy lungers, we leapt over the waterfall brink,
felt our shoulderblades release gunshy decades. Our whole, sprawling existence spilled like juice
in a blacklight bedroom of tripwire-notebooks.
Bookmark the grapefruit horizon, the frostbitten panthers yowling an ibis flock loose from a tongue patch of razor palms.
It may feel like you’re learning to surf in a bomb
cyclone, the whole ocean against your armswhile blackhawk helicopters in your heart
kickstart blood to your brain.
As I stride among the driftwood and wreckage,my town; one badfish tidepool of gnarly weed
lurking like a ghost child
looking up into frigid, infinite nothingness: blue.Bliss. Then blue, again. Again.
