Gem Arbogast
Chisel
I was sent to you, like J. Paul Getty got all those giant travertine stones on boats from Italy & all
my mother said was how could he afford all that to make this museum free--so I felt like I was
a lot. You sculptor, seeing the good in the block, running my voice through Logic, face flickering
like a graphic equalizer, like I wouldn’t understand it.
Still makes me crawl that I was the most beautiful
girl you’d ever known. I didn’t think that’s
what this was about. From a distance
I am barely a girl. Known, not
beautiful. Thank you,
said the travertine.
Sure, seventeen
while you can.
Get bored not looking for the eight-thousand-year-old feather fossilized in the eastern wall.
You told me one night you tried to fly up here by surprise. I said I hope you never do that
before I’ve washed my hair. Remember how, more even than loved, I wanted to be inside out.
my mother said was how could he afford all that to make this museum free--so I felt like I was
a lot. You sculptor, seeing the good in the block, running my voice through Logic, face flickering
like a graphic equalizer, like I wouldn’t understand it.
Still makes me crawl that I was the most beautiful
girl you’d ever known. I didn’t think that’s
what this was about. From a distance
I am barely a girl. Known, not
beautiful. Thank you,
said the travertine.
Sure, seventeen
while you can.
Get bored not looking for the eight-thousand-year-old feather fossilized in the eastern wall.
You told me one night you tried to fly up here by surprise. I said I hope you never do that
before I’ve washed my hair. Remember how, more even than loved, I wanted to be inside out.
Mosquitoes
In the year without sleep or futility we kept mosquitoes
at bay with a backyard fire pit, & you kept my friends out
of arm’s reach with a whispered tell them you’re tired & want
to go home & we’d be alone, not talk about how nobody should
have to make a home at fourteen/fifteen, that should already be
there, instead talk about how friends went around sharing
which person was taking up the most space in their brains,
that’s not how ocd works & you didn’t know that & I didn’t
even know that, spent all night telling you voice, intrusive,
& you were too sad to sleep, & I gave my legs to the bite
of my fingernails, & this blood did not at-bay your fire,
so when the part of me that meant it said I’m too tired tonight
you countered after all this work I’m doing? & I really saw you
then, girlhood-soft, countering, never saying how it felt
to be chosen in the noise, & if I said I felt good
I meant I felt like I was a good person, & we worked
our skin with the promise that everybody else would leave
someday, fly away with all this red in their see-through bodies.
at bay with a backyard fire pit, & you kept my friends out
of arm’s reach with a whispered tell them you’re tired & want
to go home & we’d be alone, not talk about how nobody should
have to make a home at fourteen/fifteen, that should already be
there, instead talk about how friends went around sharing
which person was taking up the most space in their brains,
that’s not how ocd works & you didn’t know that & I didn’t
even know that, spent all night telling you voice, intrusive,
& you were too sad to sleep, & I gave my legs to the bite
of my fingernails, & this blood did not at-bay your fire,
so when the part of me that meant it said I’m too tired tonight
you countered after all this work I’m doing? & I really saw you
then, girlhood-soft, countering, never saying how it felt
to be chosen in the noise, & if I said I felt good
I meant I felt like I was a good person, & we worked
our skin with the promise that everybody else would leave
someday, fly away with all this red in their see-through bodies.
Gem Arbogast is a poet and musician from Seattle. They are currently a poetry reader at Split Lip Magazine, a publicist at Poetry Northwest, and an undergraduate at the University of Washington. Their work appears in Hooligan Magazine, Cobra Milk, and the Sonora Review, and their music can be heard on Heavenly Creature Records.