NEW ORLEANS IS FORSAKEN THIS TIME OF YEAR
a cartoon cigar smoking a cartoon cigarette with a look of rancid terror on its filter-face.
you good? i’m good.
nails bitten down low as they’ll go. only out of habit, though.
crows, with butcher knives as wings, clanging down the street, unable to catch flight off the
⠀⠀⠀⠀ whetstone of the city. gravity, you see.
what if the world was turned up actually, and we as humans see way more pink in the world than is
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀natural?
a house suddenly raises five degrees on its east side, so you dig in with your walk.
how high might you turn your dial if you had control of your ocular intake of pinks, say the volume
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀goes up to a 100 and you’re on a 20 right now?
they call that style shotgun-style, its residents dormant shooters.
canoes nope on out down the thick watery street.
i’m willing to bet the amount of people in hell is actually quite small, and that many of the usual
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀suspects aren’t even there.
angels are lousy at taking attendance, lobbing visions at the masses instead of what they’re paid for
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ (tearing our tickets in the wings).
a bottle of percocet prescribed to a person in a great deal of pain.
if you’re thirsty, you should drink something.
i once threw a man from a moving sedan. technically, this used to be the definition of self-care.
i got 10 on 2. 10 on 2 for the love of god 10 on 2. this poor widow put in more than all the rest.
what do you do for a living? i work the door. i swear on my mother.
if i put a gun to your head and told you to name every color in a basic rainbow, could you do it?
please, this thing isn’t loaded.
FERTILIZER
Henry Goldkamp (he/they) is an experimental poet and interdisciplinary artist whose work blurs the boundaries between poetry, visual art, and community performance through public installations of intermedia. He lives in New Orleans, where he co-runs The Splice Poetry Series, acts as intermedia editor for the small press Tilted House, and teaches rhetoric at Louisiana State University. Art and criticism appear in Indiana Review, Best New Poets 2021, Denver Quarterly, Seneca Review, Accelerants, Volt, Triquarterly, Tyger Quarterly, Bat City Review (winner of the 2022 Hybrid Prize), Afternoon Visitor, DIAGRAM, Landfill, and Annulet, among others. His public art projects have been covered by NPR’s Morning Edition and Time and he was recently an artist-in-residence at Mary Sky in Vermont.