by Liam Strong
think of leggings as pocket-less nebulae, Halsey. blame every absence & exclusion on pen ink, etchings in marble, the cartography of scar tissue. can you play the triangle or sing, Halsey. can you riff a recorder down to whittlings. can you purge the voice from a radio. can you moan static into his eardrums. can he be more distressed. make him more distressed. please.
Halsey, text your lover when driving even when they’re the passenger. especially. we are often loved by people who should not be loving. or loving us. on the stereo another song about being tired of learning who’s the newly dead celebrity. in the hayloft, the one where you kissed him or him or them. in the hayloft a bird or a bat or both wept a bloodless rhyme. discarded beaks down-poured from the a-frame. like raisins hard as obsidian. like falling pecks onto your neck. whatever weather fits the occasion.
Halsey, you contort my heart from (((((.))))) to }}}}@{{{{
Halsey, the fag has still got it. you can’t amputate the syllable. your mother’s dresser in the kitchen, the over-sized cutting board like the ankle of a sequoia, her woodworking unlike a diamond cutter. your mother, the diamond cutter. you put away spatulas into the diamond, cut diamonds on the
diamond. it’s what’s borne from your hands, Halsey, the fag, who’s got it in their blood-work, the fag who’s hasn’t got a pack of slims to spare but has a limb or two to lie on as comfort. you don’t know what happens to diamonds when they burn. nor do you want to.
calling some fuck boi bloodless feels like a weak insult, Halsey. life goes on without & so does he. the insult is in the pudding. he has no pudding. is he the nihilist, is he your pointlessness, your everything & nothing all at once. what’s so good about our blood anyway. what’s so good about taxidermy, necromancy, a prolonged funeral dirge. maybe you could order a flurry of sparrows. or a storm of confetti. he probably won’t even care, though.
HALSEY!!!!!! I LOVE YOU!!!!!! HERE’S A CELEBRATORY KUMQUAT!!!!!!!
orgasms require, at most, one hand, one less, Halsey, a helix imprinted into a cuckoo clock. Rankine’s theory of potential energy that every captured moment of bliss has the ability to be its inverse. you & your family road trip to Yellowstone is a sad picture despite the smiles all around. your ex-girlfriend giving you a piggyback ride. postcards of rainbows aimed toward heaven. the climax, the anti-climax, the in-between, the gray area, the lack of binaries. you can’t take a pic of nothing. you’ll always take a picture of something. his snapshot of you, your crux, the one where you’re the center of the universe, just for a spliced second. it could have been joy.
Liam Strong (they/them) is a queer neurodivergent straight edge punk writer who has earned their BA in writing from University of Wisconsin-Superior. They are the author of the chapbook Everyone’s Left the Hometown Show (Bottlecap Press, 2023). You can find their poetry and essays in Impossible Archetype and Emerald City, among several others. They are most likely gardening and listening to Bitter Truth somewhere in Northern Michigan.
