REVENGE POEMS by Christie Ann Reynolds
Poetry | $10 ($8 direct from SUPERMACHINE)
Hand-bound. 24 pp, 8.5 x 5.5 in
Letterpress printed cover
OUT OF PRINT
REVENGE FOR THE SHARK DEATH I DESERVE
There is an echo that is too long to listen to.
Everything we have known about each other
changes moment to moment. If it stops
I think we might die. And it took me
by surprise too, how I crumpled into him like a rough napkin
on a mouth. Wasn’t I supposed to love you?
I don’t ever want to come out of here and see the sky.
I want to grab at the particles spinning
in each ream of waterlight until there is no
difference between light and light. Red and blue
things orbit and are closer than you think. I break
my teeth on how beautiful they are. Sometimes
these things fall but burn dark and ashy,
almost completely disappear before touching down.
A bright but quick glow about the rim
of the sky and then nothing. It takes me by the hair
when I realize that so much of what I love
about you is gone before I can touch it.
I want dive and surface. Dive and surface.
I want to take everything about you into me,
everything about you into me and into me.
I want to cease body in the middle of the ocean,
float back to where I once walked,
wash up on shore.
In the sun my gills curve to cantaloupe rinds.
Children poke my abdomen with wiffle bats.
++++++++++++++++++
Christie Ann Reynolds holds degrees from Hofstra University, The New School and Queens College. Brenda Shaughnessy chose her manuscript, idiot heart, as the 2008 winner of The New School Chapbook 
Competition. She is the co-author of the chapbook Girl Boy Girl Boy (Correspondences) and the author of the chapbook Revenge Poems forthcoming from Supermachine. Christie Ann's work can be found in Blaze Vox, Pax Americana, La Petite Zine, My Name is Mud, EOAGH, Maggy, Sub-Lit, The Houston Literary Review and others. She teaches writing at Hofstra University and is one of the newly inducted co-curators of the Stain Reading Series in Bushwick, Brooklyn.