“Untitled 1: After a week fearing the future” of Gwendalynn Roebke
Untitled 1: After a week fearing the future
1.
Prophetic back aches
Each twinge
A mis-plucked guitar wire
The sound of concentration
Hunched reading
dark circles under strangers’ eyes
I taste
Of honey dreaming to go
Rancid
Tell me what frightens you
What you have seen under eyelashes
That causes you
To flinch
We do not have to be bound by
Fortellings
Determinism isn’t all restraint
It is the freedom of eternity
Made gentle
2.
Oh at last
Lorca’s beloved
Ignacio
Sanchez
Mejias
I can be steady
Through my condemnation
Glad
For the the unzipping
Of your chest
By the bull’s horns
Whom you had taunted too many a
time
Cultivating a garden
In your shattered skull
Beautiful
As the lore of masculinity
That teases death
Is dismembered before the masses
They will write of you
Gorgeous hero of antiquity
Back when being sightly
Was a man’s pride
To be splattered across an audience
What solidified legend
All that has changed
In this ritual of instigated grief
Is the arena
And the
costumes
3.
How many unique love poems can you write
In a lifetime?
The ‘unique’ is important here
Does love begin to fold in on itself
An indiscernible reverence
Attributed in the same fashion and quantities
To all lovers
And those to be loved
And those to be forgotten
Once the dizziness of strangeness
Sits in the belly
Special
Isn’t that the word we want love to be conjoined with?
Unfathomable and selfishly
All ours
Possessive of hearts and their glances
Is there a healthy sameness
And difference
In our learning of love
I want love to be ugly
Stretched thin
Peppered with worn patches and
tears’ processions
Well, an idealized love I do not know in reality
In reality
I lump all my love together
Let it settle to the bottom of my soul
Sugar sinking, clumping, at the bottom of a coffee
Where I drink up all the bitter
Anticipating a rich sweetness
At the end
That is almost
Too much
Gwendalynn Roebke
They/Them/Theirs
Gwendalynn Roebke is Black/multiracial, gender non conforming, they/them just doing their best to exist. They write and perform poems and had their first full length collection "A Bruxist Manifesto" published by Really Serious Literature in the fall of 2021. They derive much of the subject matter of their poems from their eclectic undergraduate studies around neuroscience, astrophysics, and existentialism. Currently, Gwendalynn is studying for an MA in social and applied pjilosophy at Marquette University. Are they a poet? Debatable. Really they just want to write interesting things and design their own tattoos.