The Narcissist Hears What You’re Trying to Do There
Grabs your argument in a certain hand, clenches
your words in a fist,
spits
them back at you before you’ve decided
what you were even trying
to say. Perhaps
there wasn’t a manipulative germ
or any exhumed dirty word,
maybe
what he can hear and see
is the extent of it,
transparent,
but he’s perspicacious with a straight spine,
drawn to full height,
tongue
slashing, that dripping dagger
to remind
every syllable matters
in the way
it could possibly relate
to him. Admit
he wasn’t part of the intended audience,
meandering sentence
still unspooling from your lips?
Unthinkable.
Unforgiveable sin.
He has to stop you before you can begin.
Swing Song
Squeak creak squeal
squeak creak squeal: across the street,
a couple in their twenties
pumps long legs into glassy sky, bodies
flung nearly perpendicular
to the top of the bar, so high. Individual
horizons. Now she knows those sounds
last week at sundown
did not mean she was going to break
something.
How silly to think the weight
of forty-seven years means anything
to a swing
ready to squeak all comers into the clouds
and back to thirteen,
sullen, holding a Walkman
turned up loud, back to seven,
screaming in delight, pushed
so hard she had to hold on
tight. All the way home,
their palms will thrum
with effort while their minds
fly, worries having fallen
from their pockets like pebbles
into sand,
the smell of salty steel
still kissing their hands.
Kasandra Larsen’s work has appeared in Best New Poets, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Into the Void Magazine, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Two Hawks Quarterly, and others. Her manuscript CONSTRUCTION was a finalist for the 2016 Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry; her chapbook STELLAR TELEGRAM won the 2009 Sheltering Pines Press Chapbook Award. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee.
