four poems
by Ben Starr
bedtime routine
At night I place my hands in a drawer. My feet underneath
the bedside table, stored in a solid obsidian hatbox.
My nose I detach and keep in a small, polished green egg.
Ears float in separate pools of expensive French perfume.
Each tooth rests on a dime-sized pillow. I keep them under
glass next to my tongue, wrapped in lavender-scented rice paper.
The zipper for my skin runs along my spine. I hang myself
on a mannequin formed from my most aspirational measurements.
I like to keep my eyes right in their tiny bowls, they shine like torches
wielded by frightened townspeople. My dreams at the mercy of an angry mob.
the day i became a land mass
I was thirteen when I first noticed
dirt under my fingernails. In my hair,
between my curling toes. Indigenous
grasses sprouted. Eyes fraternal twin
volcanoes, bubbling in bright magma.
Insides filled with layers of sediment.
My skin the bark of a redwood, pain
traveling the circumference of every
historic ring. A mountain range
emerged at my spine, verdant valleys
at its base, great rivers and meandering
streams crept from brown foothills.
My smallest movement triggered
great fissures in my crust and vast
displacement of the native peoples.
Their prayers ignored, my ears pierced
by so many high pitched screams.
how the tropicana got her groove back
Imploded, Tropicana must now pick up her crumbled pieces,
heavy with seventy years of sinewy purple steaks and
drunk on rum and cokes dusted with cigarette ash.
So off she goes, twenty stories of
reinforced concrete and folies bergere,
lumbering down I-15 to Joshua Tree
for moonless nights, midnight trips to skull rock,
devil’s mushrooms in a used ziplock, fed to her
via jib crane by some guy draped in too much tie-dye.
To reclaim her Miami Modern physique,
she will subsist on a diet of mineral rich foods
like raw tungsten and alumina cement;
and exposure therapy, boring thick and deep
as the Spring Mountains. When she ceases to feel
nostalgic at the tin clink of a rusted nickel,
Tropicana, the Tiffany of the Strip, can return
to the crater of hot earth where she once stood, to feast
under the ferocious lashing of a ripe persimmon sun.
the wolf
When I first became a wolf I liked my thick tufted fur. The way my testicles just hung out collecting air. The roughness of my pink tongue. But I did not like all the new responsibility.
The city council demanded that I teach them how to be more like wolves. How to smell and be smelled. The mayor even got down on all fours and howled at the moonless sky. What a fool!
Before long my wife chased the city council away with a broomstick. They scattered down the steps and onto the burnt grass of the yard where they made circles in the dust before laying down to paw at their hairless skin.
Photo of Ben Starr
BIO: Ben studied poetry in college and as part of the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Dishsoap Quarterly, Maudlin House, Gone Lawn, SoFloPoJo and other journals. Find more of his work on X @benjaminstarr and at benstarrwrites.com