mineral lit mag
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  • Home
  • About/Submissions
  • Masthead
  • Featured Poets Series
    • 3 poems by Chris Prewitt
    • 3 poems by Taylor Byas
    • 3 Poems by David Hanlon
    • 3 poems by Bailey Grey
  • Issues
    • Issue 1
    • Issue 1.5: Hozier-inspired
    • Issue 2
    • Issue 3: Recovery
    • Issue 3.5: Lana Del Rey
    • Special Summer Solstice Prose Issue
    • Issue 4.1
    • Issue 4.2
    • Still Standing
GAUZE
 
We drove past slaughterhouses,
industrial plants, found a winding road
we wanted fog
bloody handprints;
we wanted hitchhikers
tattered screams
bronze gates leading into the boil beneath.
 
We got a lightning storm instead
             it was a metaphor:
you the lightning,
                            tendrils of electricity spewing from your eyes,
me the ground,
                            dead moths accumulating in my stomach--
 
A bereft bolt of blue hitting the earth.
 
I saw them still,
latched onto a memory,
walking wounds with wisps
of white roaming in air,
yellow ghoul eyes
hung from cottonwoods and
nestled in rusty metal.
They cry
I hear them cry
 I cry
I cry always
we cry
because I am also
ghost.
 
You are electric in the clouds as you
peek through misty curtains,
more than a gasp I can fly through and
warmer than this subzero ache in my gut.
 
I am never allowed to unwrap from these
tissued secrets, to rip them from my body
as to untangle from my phantoms
 
please
 
shock the haunt out of me
 
In that car I was
             ghost
as we go past a drive-in movie theater,
I am still
             ghost
hiding in a human suit
with ground to strike
always
             ​ghost.
 
Your lips are lightning on mine so
I must be more than the
fog-figures we left behind but
they continue to roam around my bones at night.

Connor Rodenbeck is a second-year student at the University of Denver. He is majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and minoring in Psychology. His poetry and prose are forthcoming in Call Me [Brackets], Furrow, and ANGLES. He hopes that his work will prompt readers to consider the reciprocal manner that they and the world interact in to inform a larger picture of the human experience.
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