Poetry: Kari A. Flickinger

PC: Celia ​Schouteden

I Know I Have To Take These Pills

but I have this block happening—I believe
I am convinced

if I stick them behind my tongue—the migraines
will disappear.

My voice will come back—the trees
will reveal themselves

to me! Again! Allthing has stopped talking
to me—my host

of inanimate lovers. Green is no longer
GREEN as I want

color should be—resolvable. To be.
The cello does not

alight inside my chest—the violin has become
a barrow of strings—creaks

over stagnant waters. I cannot feel
the sun on my face. I go

outside now—o maybe the sun
through the borders

of my window were more
eloquent

than I can be. Typing has gone
to shit. Fingers—steer me

wrong every time.
Five

to 5:30 with cars in between. How can
I swallow when this is all the words.

Allow me?

​

Nesting: Boiling

I'm up
too high now, faced with this beak. I
swoop elegant, curvy, bowed—I roll
ploughed, polished and feathered.

Dismantle myself for the sun with
each new crust—great flowing below
this blood—below your rock
my universe boils.

And even the universe is stunted lately.
A should’ve-been whirling
mass, I suck stars, encircle—I
melodrama and too-much need you.

Goddamn break down this gravitational
pull—these neurons once fired, are
white-hot as coal fleeing on air. Fluid
nature preens but never prevails.

You plucked me from xylophone
bones. You, minus a G flat or maybe an A
sharp. Molded sound from mud swathe
set afloat straw creation—haphazard, I
float deep and wide into orbital eddies.

Then the toothed daughters
I bear from your clammy hands (as I burst
into spontaneous being) scatter along
our vessel—until this still lagoon catches.

​

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About The Author: Kari A. Flickinger

Kari A. Flickinger's poetry has been published in or is forthcoming from Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Burning House Press, Door Is A Jar, Isacoustic, Ghost City Review, Eunoia Review, and Riddled with Arrows, among others. She is an alumna of UC Berkeley. When she is not writing, she can be found playing guitar and singing to her unreasonably large Highlander cat, as well as obsessively over-analyzing the details of neighboring trees.