Thanks to everyone who attended the June KPACT Kick Back where we collected funds for the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF). NCSF is an organization whose primary aim is to raise awareness of sex positive and alternative relationships, and advocate for the rights of anyone in the BDSM, kink, and polyamorous communities.
Four Imagined Early Deaths
by RE (Ellis) Katz
i.
I die
torchways. I call my best sweetest leopards
throttle my darlings. Cycle back
into photos from before I was bron
with ripped corners—ancestors standing
shoulder to shoulder like a
bar graph about rainfall. Ship my
papers. Strip my bed.
Slip into the millionth
mouth of a marbled canyon
like I am slipping in between the sheets
on a hot night where there is already another
hot body beating bending into dream.
I press my cracked lips to that forehead
that forehead
doesn’t feel a thing.
Breezes go home to their mothers.
Stars are kept away
from other stars.
ii.
I die.
I forget what I was saying.
and then
I die. I die
practicing dying which means
I die
fast
asleep
on a flight from the city
where I was born
to the city where I will
die. I die and
the cabin pressure holds.
All of the rolling suitcases shift
during the flight
in the shape of
I D-I-E.
iii.
I die
in costume. I die on stage
with one eye trained
on the audience wasted on
their reactions. I die and cannot
be roused for a curtain call.
Applause is drippy infinite
I follow
homesickness light rain spotlight
rainslicker spotlight
howling monstrosity
a moon
exhumed
I die.
iv.
I die
in a club in a hall
of meat.
I die dancing
in a club not
our club no this
club is a new club.
I burst
something in an unknown club
like a ceramics museum these
faces only half
available to stark light
of lapsed tangerines—
modern telescopes
and their makers.
I need to tell you about
the song. It is our favorite song
and I die
to our song and
when we loved we agreed
to be all these separate fragments
so I am flung apart
and I die
dancing. I die of ceremony
of lostness. Here it comes
the highest
note and I find
a way to punish
infinite space. You can see
the pale green
bathwater
everywhere. And the bass
the thunder of moving
our dirty couch to another
apartment. Another basement
a field a parking lot a null set
cauterized. That bass that thrum
the beginning
of a hedge maze.
I die and
everyone who parks
remembers where.
