year turning

gasp vertebrae’s sliced outfeeling
what gay’d tenancy? boy cat rubbing
cheeks on floored stacks till they fall
year we slipped wasted on ice
stayed grounded making out
every psychedelic sunset imprint of
mystics who did not die wilding out
cat hair and dust amplify tongue’s
thick desire to crawl out corners
diluting landlord’s knack for negligence
fucking the gray off middling day
how differently we tend to our mustaches!
passing back and forth a threat toward sleep
pink cloud sucking thigh

Dusked

what potency?
dyke ikkyū
crests side streets
snowed-in
philadelphia
adjacent
vaginas
swoon necks 
down rug
shone out
i too love
pleasure’s
countenance
bloodless dildo
warms anyway

demolition covers

half broken toilet 
an exercise in patience 
thinking trickling
would never end

queer who got dumped for
looking too much like other queer’s mom
day’s first birds 
saying what’s up

bargain paper towels
purple cleaning fluid
who exactly is deluding 
us, and how? 

every year jill’s grandmother 
taking all eight kids to the dollar store
jill’s lifelong commitment to picking only clowns
what does that say about me

becoming abominable to spite 
sex on a birth certificate
domesticity’s big yawn
a lullaby                     xray pets                     Blur

each year more of my friends
become therapists 
discord of people living with chronic pain and illness 
i drop memes into 

an orange growing
mold in a bowl 
colors are drugs, too
my thesis for another year

shelf life of peanut butter
vs. shelf life of contentment 
saying “we’re so back” to 
newly lined trashcan

who breaches your psyche 
believing each cut 
like baby i was
born to bear it

belly up
sharing mundanities
chanting at the close
but an addict is an addict is— 

my friend falls in love
with a man who only just
got out of a doomsday cult
says, our beliefs are very different

for example, how i feel about the police
is how he feels about the post office
you drag drug me down
sealing us in something so shitty

i saw glow of streetlights out the window
heard drunken yells of the party porch
felt across the way another queer’s loneliness
took bare branches into my chest hole

let them sway jagged 
i was guilty then not guilty then guilty again
i made memes
slammed screen shut

grunted, sweat and moaned
i fucked sideways
            skyward
            to hit my insides with something sharper than rain

i woke in the middle of the night
and repeated the names of people
in my life like prayers to regain my life 
i forgot who i saw die in front of me 

why bother to stop drinking
if you remain 
a wet and lopsided mind
that craves and craves 

i held doorframes
for the feeling of threshold
i turned over pebbles in my palm
and they became bouldering

if i bouldered so what
if i crashed who cared  
and what did I do?
fell down and threw up 

the person who loved me most
died at sunrise two days after
her last birthday
and i guess i’m lucky for that

sixty seven years between us
in chicago a carriage house
behind a grocery store
padne bednash cooking a potato over an open flame

“just a potato,” she said, “and it was so good”
she always said a good cook
can make even a bad piece of meat taste good
and isn’t that so me?

half rotten, seasoned to perfection
photographing grocery outlet’s
most foul items for some story
i’ll never tell

what were all the photographs
trying to show, really? some proof
of foreclosure or to say, see,
light comes to me even now

blood soaked blunt weaponry
i never wanted to wield
but what we want
and what we get, well

it is raining it is fading
it is the end of what so compelled
and what did I say?
“no fear”

or “miracles DO fuck” 
or whatever sad slogan
i’d emblazoned on my
mind’s eye that wednesday

when you set out to
ease from my veins
some softer substance
hollow, blood born
of warmer days 

Ebs Sanders is a poet and editor living in Philadelphia. They co-edit the tiny and are the author of Intimacies that did not destroy us (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and A Fallow Channel (Gauss PDF, 2020). Their work has been published in Asterion Projects, baest, bedfellows, blush, Cul-de-sac of Blood, Discount Guillotine, Full Stop, Keith LLC, peel lit, Prolit, the Rumpus, and Tripwire, among others. Their art has appeared at Vox Populi. See more at eebbss.com