Two Poems

 

This Will Do Just Fine 

You know that lemonade you make from powder

I know a guy that would pour it dry into his palm

Then go to his room and lick it and he said

It was kind of like making lemon saliva

He said it made his father really mad

He was like fourteen which yes is too old

Did I just read him I don’t know 

How things work really they just do or they don’t 

It doesn’t matter how many times I look it up

I’d like to have more lived experiences

I’d like to have fewer déjà vu experiences

Can you have one without the other

I’m not as big of a gossip as I expect me to be

Or other people I’m guessing but again who knows

This isn’t the world’s biggest game of marry fuck kill

This is poetry it’s an opera and we’re singing

Marry the soprano she was born for this part

I don’t ever want to stop clapping

Sometimes I applaud my empty house 

Fill everything with the love you make from it

I’ll Say Gin or I Won’t

Bring everything broken to the beach

I don’t remember how to build a fire

I don’t remember wanting to

But who wouldn’t put the glass in their kitchen 

Something about sand

Who wouldn’t go for a free remodel

No one’s painted this place since the ’70s 

New carpets sure but what about these green cabinets

Nothing stored but lids we can’t find the pots to

Fractured mason jars

Ant corpses

This isn’t a party exactly

So basically we’ve got to start over

How many of us would dive into the waves

How many if we lost track of the shore

How many if we hadn’t any boats 

Several times a year my father flies to Alabama 

Where they’ve got a navy base 

They pay him to go down into the subs

To fix electrical panels that keep the motors running

Sometimes I think about him getting stuck on one

My father is a larger man than subs are built to suit

Then I start having feelings

Often I marvel at anyone willing to risk it

Not just the drowning but the pressure 

The ocean’s will to crush everything 

If everything gets deep enough

Is a beach house a beach house if

You throw everything out if it into the waves

How can someone stand on the shore and not


Doug Paul Case is the author of the chapbooks Something to Hide My Face In (Seven Kitchens, 2015) and College Town (Porkbelly Press, 2015). He is the poetry editor of Word Riot, and his poems have recently appeared in Court Green, Washington Square, Juked, and Devil’s Lake.