Julia Cohen

Not For June

I slow-danced with a gamma ray
I angeled the lawn with my bikini weapon
That’s the history of bedfellows & Easter
Jam flowers into your cell phone & you aren’t
80% napping anymore
How you entered a competition by carving
the initial glance into a tree
Layover, linzer torte, laundry chagrined
to the line & oh husky pollination awaits us
This is the grass I lay my lounge chair
& this is the towel we’ll share
Some lotion & a neon slushy
Big hands for big books
Besmirch me with your merchant grin
We can live as we read & we can
shed supplies like the opposite
of ganging up on
Like an Easter egg hunt we begin
the game of HORSE from inside
the daffodil out of batteries
you are the only one who can die for you
the summer before 7th grade tightropes
the white line across the hot parking lot
bitch slapping ghosts through the lemonade
 

Not For June

When I say I attended
the wake of the wake of the wake
I mean I miss your sidestroke
your hangdog outfit drying
in the sandpit
A movie mistaken for your hands
is how I touch
myself, charcoal theater rejecting projectors
Popcorn like springtime buttering up
the baby grass & future suntans
Your cloud hisses as it deflates
over the hill
Credits roll like a hearse-shaped book
I pull up in my licorice Chevrolet
Cinema splinters into seasons
It’s almost June
A lake lined with chalkboards
A calculating wind
An emergency break like your chipped promise
Space is all I feel
When I say, I say

Julia Cohen is the author of Triggermoon Triggermoon (Black Lawrence 2011) and two forthcoming collections from Brooklyn Arts Press and Noemi Press. Her poetry and lyric essays appear in journals like Colorado Review, Kenyon Review Online, Black Warrior Review, and DIAGRAM.