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.