[A traincar passenger has spilled his blueberries]
Bailey Cohen-Vera
Poor blueberries their purple stains
Like a feeling I am feeling broodish
I am thinking about being fucked
Sober All my days are questions
They make a wonderful audience
For my oblivion performance
They make it hard to live
Hard to pass the time
Hard to forget that I am sitting
Quietly I find the need to be dramatic
I want you to imagine me licking the blueberries
From the floor I’ll let you even imagine the state
Of my body Its shape
I am a man
Who likes his sentences sharp
I am not interested in answers only
Avoidance I don’t mind being lonely
In fact I welcome loneliness into my room
As if it had a name as if loneliness
Was what I named my desperation
Or at least what became of it can you
See it I am on all fours as if bowing
Obedient to such colors
Tastes and small fleeting glories
Bailey Cohen-Vera is the Assistant Editor for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. A poet, essayist, and book reviewer, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, Poet Lore, Waxwing, The Spectacle, Poetry Northwest, and Sugar House Review, among elsewhere. He has received numerous Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations, and his work has been featured in several anthologies such as The BreakBeat Poets Vol.4: LatiNEXT. Serving as the organizer of the Strange Tools Writer’s Workshop, Bailey is a Wiley Birkhofer Fellow in Poetry at NYU. His website is baileycohenpoetry.weebly.com.