Kyle Hemmings

The May Featured Poet is Kyle Hemmings

Please feel free to email Kyle at: hemming06@hotmail.com

AFTER THE MASQUERADE

You wake up next to a werewolf.
You can’t exactly remember where
you were last night except it was
some kind of party where strangers
fondled your form through masks.
You turn over and the werewolf growls.
You won’t coo to it because werewolves
don’t buy that kind of shit. You sit up,
lean forward. It stirs. You then decide
to move forward, slowly dress, avoid
its glaring eyes in your dresser mirror.
It jumps on your back, its nose nuzzled
against your ear, its panting sounds
shaping the rims of possible words.
By the time, you reach the bottom
of the stairs, you’ll know everything
there is to know as to why werewolves feel
so winter-drift empty after one night stands.

WORLD VIEW

Seventeen nightmares and
your June bugs
still line up
on the windowsill
for breadcrumbs for
a wingspan of
your love.
You swallow atrocity
as if shedding skin.
You spit everything
back
through metal teeth.

The meteor rain infiltrates us.
We are cosmonauts taking up deep space,
declaring colonies for the clones of our parents,
the petty in-laws. Nothing is as real
as catching up to light years of star-ghosts,
heavenly bodies of myth.
Pegasus has a blind spot for us.
Tell Ground Control to meet us for tea.
Your mother transmits her love
through unmanned stations.

THE SCHIZOPHRENIC GIRL

It’s your nightmare. Your personally-stamped
crawl-to-shuffle. Walk it tenderly.
It can bite when you’re juking a dream.
Zombies double as bell-ringers. There’s no
place you never walk out completely alive,
parts intact. The gum you left as a child,
under the seat of an old Paramount Theater,
holds your fingerprints, as if you never left
that silent horror feature. As if you were
destined to suck the hunger out of delirious men.

CHILLED WARNING

I keep myself in your refrigerator
    second shelf from the bottom,
cozy with lettuce heads & canned beets,
   while you've gone transpontine,
braving cracked bridges, devious geese,
   short-term terrorists with lifetimes of
unpaid ransoms.

By the time you get back,
   if you remember which side of the river
birds dive to see their prey more clearly,
   I might no longer be edible.

Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. He has been published in Elimae, Smokelong Quarterly, This Zine Will Change Your Life, Blaze Vox, Matchbook, and elsewhere. He loves 50s Sci-Fi movies, manga comics, and pre-punk garage bands of the 60s. He blogs at: http://upatberggasse19.blogspot.com/