Five Poems

by Karen Lozinski

Costco to the Core

Morning simmers

under breathy quadratic equations

I slip between earth and vapor

for a snifter of warm peat

and a non-denominational prayer

at the beginning of this increment

I am the afterbirth of possibility

and cellular destruction in one being

I can fathom a permanent corporeal home

and why I need to rustle and rise

to bring my butt to the grocery store.

As of yet I have no celestial links.

My dot-dot-dash small universe

sings of stellar ambitions

though I don’t think that’s the same thing.

Phalanges shimmer into fireworks

bellybutton uncoils into a question

muscles crease into origami pelagic birds

that yearn to take on a wind current or two.

I sink ten thousand beds downward

my body an impossible, supple blade

through geologic layers and fire.

I land upright, on my feet,

hands planted firmly on a shopping cart.

This is fluorescent lighting for consumers—

these are the earnest, cavernous ceilings of a big box store.

At least it’s the one I like

its careful, deliberate topography

the nexus of pragmatism and desire

I could fill my heart with

eco-conscious coffee pod mega-variety packs

I could fill my cart with spiny thistles

their bristled purple blooms suddenly all around me

stalks soaring past the cellophaned pallets on high

flower heads ballooning into planetoids

I leap on to a stem as it climbs for the ceiling

and ride it back to my morning

prickles lodged in my hands and legs

except morning has split into the dust of full day

and I am left to wonder

if I should have grabbed toilet paper on my way out

Two States on I-80

Rust sings in heated keys

through these dankest days

machinery left untidy

in dark blonde fields

barely noticed from the interstate.

Blue with universal appeal

if I warble my weight to you

would the heaviness of the sky

come down on us?

Narrative nests even in chaotic rhythm

untold or unintended, we find it.

You always think transient joy

is the answer, but not right now

we could stop for a cigarette anyway—

I like to watch you smoke.

When the two AM sky roils green

I will not wake you

until I get us to a gas station

or at least an overpass.

That is when you will run

flip flops slapping dirty puddles

and I will take up smoking, at least

for the two cigarettes you leave behind

Laundry Day Diverstion

Sublimation wasn’t on the menu.

Instead it was a chunky, comforting affair

easily recognizable cubes

familiar discs floating in pasty broth

chilled vanilla globs at the end,

maraschino cherries included.

I couldn’t find a cigarette to smoke afterwards

until I remembered I’d quit ten years ago.

Cigarettes were offered as digestif,

but off-menu from a hand

I’d rather did not touch me again.

I waved them away and propped myself up

webbed myself to the unloved window shades

creased and tarnished with nicotine.

Daylight ate at their orange-brown edges

illumination manifesting more as harmonics

with every passing miasmic second

a directional thrum swollen and uncomplicated.

I couldn’t marry movement to the march

though every board I had to paint

every bill I hadn’t paid and a curdling quart

of milk at home hummed along with it.

Plus the damned wet clothes.

All prophets and prognostications swirled away

in deep blue agnostic vortices

skimming across a different rhythm,

one of sleep I couldn’t deem senseless

until I startled upright in the room’s husky grey

spun around me and hardened

but not more calcified than the night

chalking the shades with faint accusation

maybe some ridicule, some derision, then apathy.

Stuffed limbs and organs into pants and a shirt

that smelled familiar, pretty sure they were mine

hurtling away from the cerulean shimmer

of a television nestled somewhere in that apartment

to the windows, wrenching one upward and open

a position the frame wheezed and struggled to remember.

I slid down the brownstone on my chest—

small favors come in the form of first floor flings—

crashing into a chorus of garbage cans

sent flying into this otherwise quiet area

of a building on an otherwise quiet block.

I felt a little bad for leaving them jumbled like that

scuttling back to the laundromat on 2nd Ave

hoping no one had messed with my clothes or taken them.

It’s Summer in Louisiana All Year Long

Collectively we carry the August air

Louisiana summer doesn’t play

girding you in invisible armor

epaulets weighted with humidity

gauntlets that drip in perpetuity

a breastplate that refuses to rust and disintegrate

the alkie neighbor is halfway to clown hair

and it’s only 1pm

as he gently terrorizes the unsupervised toddler

of the careless bitch two doors down

she’s got some bleeding to do

of someone else on the other side of that phone call

because the world owes her more than she can count

sometimes she makes the alkie do her bidding

tugging on a string that makes him believe she’ll give him some

but she won’t even let him on her porch

unless she wants furniture moved.

Caught in the crossfire of their omnipresent secondhand smoke

I fasten a kite to a string

I fasten a message to the kite

I can’t find a tail

and there is no wind anyway

just air more serious than death

and a blue sky, miraculous in its purity

without a single chorus of clouds in sight

rain rarely beings relief anyway

just washes our cars further down the road

*originally published by Talon Review, Vol. 2 Issue 6: MOTHERSHIP, July 2022.

Coping Skills

Since the birth of video

I’ve gotten along anaerobically

petting the virtual dogs of real strangers

always betting on the surreal to win.

Trauma is a bitch to clean

because of its proclivity for crevices

never knew there were so many tight spaces

in a psyche otherwise geared to go.

Aspirating snowstorms in other hemispheres

while calling it libations a vacation

I’ve learned how to weather almost anything

except the omnipresent ice of heartbreak.

Then comes the velvet seascape of you

salt that hangs in the air actually stars

their luminescence crackles on my tongue

warmth from sun lingers for hours

I take dedicated lessons in contentment.

I hope I can muster the same for you

though I still blur into a twitch fest

trauma is a bitch to clean

I’m learning to tie sail to mast

setting my first small craft in water come morning.

BIO: Karen Lozinski hails from New York City and lives in New Orleans. She's a multidisciplinary artist who earned her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. Her writing appears in Mantis, The Citron Review, Chapter House Journal, Talon Review, Scapegoat Review, Red Ogre Review, The Dead Mule, ellipsis… literature and art, 300 Days of Sun, Fifty Word Stories, In Parentheses, Defunkt Magazine and Gabby and Min's Literary Review and is forthcoming in The Bookends Review and The Broadkill Review. IG: @karenlozinskiphotography.