Huntington
I lived for a suburban porch like this, the boys getting drunk on Modela. The night humid and not too cold, I was numb and tense, kept taking drags off my boyfriend’s cigarette, raking my tongue over my teeth. I watched N cut lines for us, fat white caterpillars, his hand butterflying over an Elton John CD. When we were done, we fed the silver disc into the boom box. None of the boys were clean-shaven, cradling the necks of their bottles, green curves resembling the shapes of bodies. I was folded in half in a porch chair, saucers for eyes, in love with the evening, the Japanese Maple softened red by the moon. In love with my boyfriend’s ankles, his black socks, his slippers. He was sipping his beer and adjusting his pockets. I watched him sit down and get up and sit down again. The clear pond of his eyes. In them, I could count every Sunday morning, always the sounds of someone moving furniture upstairs.
Cul-de-sac
The term Cul-de-sac means dead end. No through road. No Exit. It derives from the term derivitculum, meaning ‘an abnormal pouch or sac opening from a hollow organ.’ From the Latin Culus, bottom, or bottom of a sack.
By these standards, if the neighborhood is a living organism, then the cul-de-sac is an abnormal growth. The cul-de-sac has a fine skin of freshly cut grass. It has been said that the cul-de-sac is “a suburban treasure left to die.” The cul-de-sac embodies a period more than a comma. An ending to a thought. Something you circle around on a bicycle in the heat of an afternoon.
*previously published in Fecund Mag*
Self Portrait
If I could have kept anything
it would have been his whiskey scent, the whole month
ripe and yellow as a banana, something
I could devour fast in this 96-degree heat. Now I watch
as the pink moon on the cactus rots,
how its shadow is tangled on the windowsill.
O what am I? Today slanted with an apology.
I told no one, pressed the season to the satin pillow.
If only I liked myself while sitting down.
The mirror, the way
my face leaks out of it and into me.
Chloe Marisa Blog (she/her) is a writer, bookseller, and educator from Huntington, New York. She received her MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poems have been featured at Fecund Magazine, Seventh Wave Magazine, Bad Pony Magazine, among others. Her poetry touches on themes of desire, obsession, and the strange horror of growing up in the American suburbs. Follow her on Instagram.