Elena Gomez
Elena Gomez co-hosts the occasional apartment poetry series, CELL, and co-edits SUS press. She is the author of two chapbooks, CHILL FLAKES (SUS press) and PER, a collaborative work with Eddie Hopely (Make Now Books). Her work can also be found online, at The Claudius App and Cordite.
Sweeping leaves is a weekly chore
she liked [found pleasure in it]
to click her tongue and displace
a wire & plastic retainer while
staring into the faces of young
children who turned to seek out
strangers on the south-west bus.
I prefer to describe myself
as plucky rather than as
allergic to scholarship
though it becomes easier
to feign allergy if one embodies
the disease-like components of
it such as limp limbs,
a dim eye
an untended ‘garden’
[to chuckle now would be rude].
the very minute you admit weakness
of literal concepts a fresh spring air
takes hold and carries you forth
to the edge of the football field.
you swoon at the thought of dialectics
not a swoon from desire but from
an overwhelming sense of the walls that
close in you also must perfect the
blank stare, the short-tempered child-like
frustration that occasionally
very occasionally, involves hurling
a remote through a nearby doorway.
would have preferred to be visited
by the ghost of alma mahler.
the beauty of names is they can inspire
thoughts of pleasantness in a woman.
I used to be afraid of long lines, the way
they snaked across a page the way they
furiously eluded my grasp, which already
was a weak sick thing.