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POETRY

Issue No. 5 || REVERENCE

Three Poems by Despy Boutris
Despy Boutris

PRAIRIE PSALM


I’m not asking for much. Only everything:

to sprawl in every open field, to never age,

to always be the most fuckable girl

pumping gas at the Shell station.

I don’t want much: only to shelter a hand

between mine, to lie here in the grass

until the last star dies out. These days,

I’m all pencil-scrawled poems, or all bovine,

always back in the pasture on my hands

& knees. These days, I write & write

until I don’t disappear, or look up

at lilac-colored clouds. Sometimes,

the night is so beautiful I can hardly bear it,

moonlight resting in my open palm.

I want to live here, lying in silt,

making wishes on clover: for hip-length hair,

eternal life, a girl pressing her mouth

to my inner thighs until bruises bloom

like violets. To name this cicadasong

a psalm, this poem a kind of prayer.



||



IN WHICH I FANTASIZE AGAIN ABOUT BECOMING A FIELD, OR ANOTHER POEM ON MY FEAR OF COMMITMENT


Field,

please teach me to be

open:

let me welcome birdcall,

cricketsong,

insects sunning

on blades

of grass. Let me

keep close what’s good:

watered roots

& windswept seeds;

bloom like wild lupine

& yarrow. Let me

call this chest

thrum broken

winged sparrow, chorus

of bees. Soil

scented hands,

a mouth

shaped bruise blooming

on my neck

like wild violet. Field,

let me learn

to accept what I want

the way you do,

what’s offered

at dawn: your lips

parted open for sun

light, mine

for the spoonful

of honey she offers.



||



ON JOY


Tonight, gathering wild garlic blooms,

I think of your hands spanning my smooth hips,

breath on my neck, how the feel of your lips

turns me feral. Above, the waning moon—

Weeks away from you, I invent a room

for only us two: floor made of marble,

enough natural light for me to marvel

at the freckle on your cheek, the perfume-

sweet scent of you, alyssum and must.

And, here, all longing, here your fallen curl

clung to the collar of my folded tee.

Tonight, I think of your hand on my knee,

and want you wet, thrusting, limbs unfurled,

want the soft sand and pearl of you, this trust.

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Despy Boutris (she/her) is the author of the fiction chapbook Burials (Bull City Press, 2022) and also has appeared in Ploughshares, Guernica, Agni, Copper Nickel, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of The West Review.

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