Casper Lee

You were awful

Friendly to me


Disorder is key

The panic-


Lady slipped on

Pine needles


She finished her

Walk as I started mine


Thor is the god of

Whatever he is doing

At the time


Time

a tasteless seed


Spreadsheet lover

Spread-cheeks lover


I want to perish

In that ass






five minutes


turns out i’m not the only bisexual around these parts

that kept saying ‘my one friend’ about my one friend

except mary maclane i think meant her only friend

(whom she was in love with and called ‘anemone lady’)

and i meant a close friend i had a whole range of feelings for

and still do. this is the friend whose inner child needs

a happy meal. so i shop for unopened happy meal toys

from the time of our childhood and consider pressing ‘buy’

but her love language isn’t gift giving or receiving so

what difference will it make? i’ve sent her photos

of happy meals when she was distressed and she liked that

so why not just breeze through the drive-thru and ask

for a bag, just the bag to put the unopened toys in and

send it to her. maybe because it’s her parents she needed

and would the bag smell like fast food all the way

through the mail? a reconstructed happy meal across

time. hell, i’m not above a large fries at this point

i could handle a large fries. hell, food is a miracle

cooking is a miracle for some of us or it’s easy

once you’re doing it. i was trying to listen to a poet

talk about paying your muses but the internet kept

jamming and i was already reading an interview

they’d done while they were talking and the one thing

i really keep noticing, one of the things, is when people

repeat the same sound-bite but we all are or i didn’t realize

you don’t have to say it a new way every time and repetition

is necessary. my dad told me fourteen times in a row

that the wood pellet stove gets the house up to eighty

‘yep keeps mom nice and warm’







It doesn’t matter what I won’t change


Absence like text messages in mid-air

I wrote this on a plane last May


Who cares if you have gout you have more in you than anyone


I mean I matched with a truck driver on Tinder named Adrian

and she waited outside the bowling alley to see if I was cute before committing to meeting me

She wore an Adidas sweatsuit which made me feel I was finally dating for leisure

I thought maybe she smelled like weed which was confirmed a few hours later

when we went back to my accommodations

and smoked with my mom and typed in songs on YouTube by our favorite singers


The day before I went on a date with Chapter, long-haired and butch, very attractive

she picked me up in an Audi with polished paint, it was so clean inside and she drove me

out onto an island to watch the sunset and as we stopped for a deer to cross

she told me her mom had just survived a brain aneurysm i.e. she was on this date

to get a break from the hospital


we ate an expensive dinner, I had some kind of roasted vegetables

she pointed out that I was resting my breasts on the table

but I was only leaning in to hear her better

she seemed to believe she knew who I was already


My mom goes to bed early eating cinnamon candies on the couch so

that’s how I found the time to go on these dates, the most vivid part of the trip

except for when my mom didn’t know she was being racist in the taxi

and told me I’m always looking for her to do something wrong

so she can’t relax around me


I went to Adrian’s house in a Lyft, costed $20 to get there and she came out to the car

and walked me inside, treated me like a lady, but she kept the lights off for the most part

She had a sheep dog with no name who was trained to salsa dance

and has since been given away


One of her rusty truck hitches leaned against the wall and I taught her a few stretches

for the knots in her back, which was sore from all those years driving even though

she’s young and when I guided her to the wall in her bedroom which had a TV really close

to the end of the bed and a soft-fuzzy blanket in zebra’s print she said

‘watch out, there’s a gun down there and it’s loaded’ I wasn’t scared

she subsumed me, wrapped around me like vines






refigure


didn’t get gray hair til’ five came at once

on my birthday you sink and bob

like a bob bisexual haircut, a lob was bob gay?

no, he was bisexual I cut your hair when I wanted

to cut mine she loves the line hurl and gliding

the rebuffed, the big wind the penmanship


I like the note more than I like the poem

you’re allowed that what I saw was a flat picture

of you, online I told you

I’m tired of not knowing you

but you weren’t the first person I was tired of

not knowing, were you? it took me this long


dick’s a well-read man with so many experiences

and it’s not that he doesn’t like people he does

lend my patterns of voice they have assets

they do not want they want not to be possessed

I am swollen with garbage at the gas station


I want to know what I don’t have to worry about

oh the thing I need help with is touch

this is slow I need language

to start working the sensational


it’s around this age we begin to recall

its purpose to help you to do

what you already know how to do

now what is it I’m talking about

let me do you a song to make it clear

I give you my receiving


at five I didn’t want to eat a piece of jerky

got spanked for hiding it

didn’t want to say I didn’t want it


Casper (Cassandra) Lee lives in Montana where they oversee an unsanctioned animal sanctuary. Their poems have appeared in publications by The Literary Review and The Poetry Project.