five poems
by Noah Berlatsky
Ripe
The vampires will not eat your face because they are spending all their time hanging like swollen
fruit from the swollen fruit tree.
But okay well and what if the inside wants that fruit the lamps are not satisfied it is a great hiss
and slither from the ominous carpet.
There is vampire juice it is a stain you can never get out of your leaves.
That is the world going about its business without faces and mostly from the hollow bits where
the face used to be you can watch the leading pundits fall.
--
End words are identical to the those of Russel Edson’s “The Fall.”
Sink Sank Sunk
I suck an anvil up my nose because let every nostril know
The great flat fish as I go down among me
How many squid and every bot in arms.
I need a better advocate I need a better kind
Of wilted bipartisan anemone. The parasite in my skull climbs me higher
Remember that day you got the date wrong? Floating
In the day you got the date wrong and it
Hisses in your beautiful
Anxiety. The gas that your stomach eats is eating
Through the best of your intentions higher
The Uber ride to thought-leader’s weight-loss tremble;
I will only speak on non-political subjects and swimming
And also maybe stimming. Up my nose anvil gas Uber I say
Again the nostril that would not know
I am strung out upon a surface
Of emergency polls, PR trends, emerging manpower in the berries
I couldn’t be happier with my paymode grow
not happy with the billing overview of water.
The gravitas of supernatural mercenaries salt
My ashes and my good problems nearer
The minions and the pale blue of you—
The ocean
Of affirmation cards I wished.
__
End words are the same as those in Barbara Guest’s poem “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher.”
Collected Poems
I turn the page and there’s some you
before I knew you, bending down a corner.
“Wholly other, and ourselves
estranged,” someone lied—
it is the same old us as ever, folding in
each other. The curve where your hip
becomes your waist I read over
year by year, a palimpsest— my poem
that is yours, and someone else’s,
and is yours.
Quotation from Sylvia Plath’s “The Great Carbuncle”
Great Starch, Great Sinew
The potato chip does not have dominion over me.
I have dominion over the potato chip!
My mouth opens like the hand of God
and the potato chip is consumed
with awe!
My mouth closes when I command it closed;
my desire is like a well-trained potato chip
which heels and retreats into the plastic potato chip bag
when I flex my gimlet eye.
I tear potato chip bags open on the first try!
I snap a potato chip in exact halves with my teeth.
There are no sharp edges!
There are no crumbs!
Salty, crispy temptress, my appetite
modulates with my rampant and towering will. Defy me,
and I relegate you to the darkness.
In my mind, there is a great and final crunch
like the closing of a tomb.
The Man I Love
Billie didn’t only love men.
And Prez was named Miss Thing.
Is it absurd, the swing
of whispering words and words
that love the love of loving,
that virile rasp of song
around the graceful horn
like the shadow of a dress forlorn
as a gardenia tossed between them?
What is love but love
that does not speak
but sings
of miss and mister
dancing through each other
sure to meet and twine,
wrong into right,
right into wrong
like a sweet and gendered song?
Photo of Noah Berlatsky
BIO: Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. His full-length collections are Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024), Gnarly Thumbs (Anxiety Press, 2025), Meaning Is Embarrassing (Ranger, 2025) and Brevity (Nun Prophet, 2025).