SUGARTIME

THREE POEMS

BY

COURTNEY LEIGH JAMESON

“These are from a new series I am doing - I am super into the idea of memory as a mode of time travel & multidimensions & time loops & other mind-warping continuum madness.”

WHITE ROOM

You can taste a selfie without liking it, eat that deep red lipstick.

I stain your hands a different shade of white, I am stunned

a deer in your eye-light. What’s the damage. A bad ride, a crash, swift

body lash. You swipe your teeth along the broken windshield, lone

hungry wolf gnashing at some invisible portrait. What you don’t see

my knuckled corpse floating inward, indelicately. A crying out for mercy

please save me from eating myself. I am full & fat & coping miserably.

I swallow the truth like a tincture of some bitter herb—the Angelica

stings my goat throat, I am throwing up a Valerian high like an old sock.

& how do you like the smell of my vomit, all insides of me. How do you

like that deep red gluttony. In you like a backyard barbequed hotdog,

all death & regurgatory. Let me pull back the flesh tape & bull pack

your heart the long way, lick face indefinitely.

ONTOGENESIS OF THE WITCH

What is your effigy of clock space—do you

stay motionless or make pivots with winged feet?

I, the face & wandering needle, am drunk on timelines.

I’m stumbling on all this talk of journeying;

constantly looking for that all-encompassing preposition

if I’m stuck under the radioactive cauldron

or pulled through its nexus, bathing in its putrid glow

am I the ghost of wet birth. Everything a cycle

living is a death & dying is living for death, & so

my head hurts of tumors, small factions of policing beetles

re-continuum as I disrupt the when.

There’s a strand of hair bleeding sap through my teeth

where did it come from, how did it get stuck between my teeth

I’m a goddamned tree, the conjoined bloom at waist

hungry animal biting at the ankles. I am the earth as I bleed

beneath layers of my skin, the air as I breathe in

doldrums. I am the water that floats me accused

the flame that rises from my bound feet guilty,

the spirit entangled in tropes. I am the blood.

I live for tonguing the dead. I keep on keeping on

YOLO timeline, one-of-a-kind life & this death unlike

any others bring me back to an effigy of carcass

as a baby covered in the same afterbirth.

SUGARTIME

The ring of Hell arouses me

time cannibalizes itself & I am hungry

again, I eat the feat of multidimensional

lines lost in my DNA.

I hang here at the center, sprawled out

like a sunflower igniting with red.

I am of one body of multiplying petals

each appendage unaware of its existence

in others, even as they brush the cheeks

of their unsuspecting neighbors.

I am living unsatisfyingly.

I meet the Devil again in a dream

another histoire d’amour

in twilight film noir. I find me

in the mirror. I pick at my face

each blemish exploding into new scars.

The Devil eats the dead skin

salty tongue lashing at me to stay.

I am everywhere else, but here.

I am fabric entwined in the dress

of this time & the next.

Courtney Leigh Jameson

is the author of "the unrequited <3<3 of red riding hood & her lycan lover (Dancing Girl Press, 2016)." She is The Bowhunter of White Stag Publishing & Kitchen Witch at Crimson Sage Apothecary.