DISCO
Every spotlight
aiming to be
the moon
has written
its own
treatise on
the infinite nature
of glitter:
art is not itself
but the light
bouncing off
of it.
But here,
in hot darkness,
sleeping in close
proximity to
the sky,
I’ve read the room
and found
the hollow face
heavy things
take on—
found
the trembling
mouth
of sincerity—
found that
grief
has a gravity
that slows time.
Death climbs
his way into
our inner circle,
and I’ve seen
the lightning of it
up close,
like the wind
catching fire.
You say in the
world’s end,
we’ll hold
each other
in a series
of beds,
in a series
of drugs,
increasing until
this is the disco
you’ve been looking for
PURGATORY VALLEY
It has come to my attention
that god has chosen me
as the next Job,
so I’ve given up
my underworld privileges,
always appearing to me
as Massachusetts,
where you’re only
as queer as your haircut.
It has come to my attention
that the night has fevered
for this culture of non-dreamers,
this era of eyes, and still
your face is a cold hole
in my sex dream of you.
It has come to my attention
that my strongest emotion is
how sad not to have a
fainting couch
everywhere I go.
It has come to my attention
that my bath time melancholy
isn’t enough to keep you.
My broken copier philosophy,
the ecology of your flushed face.
It has come to my attention
that names exist long after
the objects are gone
and that the snow makes rooms
out of shoveled bits of concrete.
The Valley’s twisted spine landscape,
the basement of this hoping.
It has come to my attention
that we’re defined by the ways
we treat the lonely
Emily Hunerwadel is the author of the chapbook Professional Crybaby, selected by Kyle Dargan for the Poetry Society of America’s 2017 Chapbook Fellowship, and Peach Woman, selected by Doublecross Press for their Bound-Together contest. Their third chapbook, Night is as Long as the Window Desires, will be published in 2023.
They won Columbia Journal’s 2019 Fall Poetry Contest, judged by Monica Sok, and their work has been featured by the Academy of American Poets, Bustle, Fonograf Editions, the Vassar Review, Quarterly West, Burrow Press, The Pinch Journal, Hold: A Journal, Dream Pop Journal, Hot Pink and Windfall Room, among others. Hunerwadel holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Born and raised in the deep south, they work as a book designer and writer in Western Massachusetts.