I remember burning driftwood
at the river just to see the smoke.
To taste something carcinogenic, flesh
sizzles when touched by matchflame
& drastic measures must be taken
to avoid drastic measures
that house of narrow ceiling diagonals,
buckets of dead flowers, chipped
yellow paint on flowerpetal ground,
my horrors in the blackberry bushes,
processed equally the trauma of living
amounts to a few plastic-rimmed tubes
inserted in my hands, all love fading,
release & carnage, death & deathlessness
this place is ground down
closed steel mills & confederate flags
or rifles that hide in closets, a gutteral
blood flooding the throat of all that
is loved, beautiful, transcendental,
or by some virtue of ignorance, peaceful
O do not disturb my echo of snapped hands,
my valleys of timber mythos, my landscape
of latter epochs, disturbed
& destroyed with time, a flourish of
orchard, dense vegetation, coniferous forest
frosted with icicles in the dead of
deepened intrinsic winter, moving
through feet of snow, miles & miles of
winded breathlike fog, the trees all dead,
trying in their solitude to love through
psychoses or psychotic dissonances, delusion
stained with radiation, terrorized with flight,
winding & waving through orchard,
mountain, foothill, etc., all the way out &
my essence is escaped my essence fearless
in the wind of the world essence breaking
with slow time, a barren pathway,
highway of fluid light, helixing
barrage of unblooded gashes,
savior I say aloud that
my head will not turn around, eyes
open to that behind, there is no
salvation or apotheosis to be found in
gazing upon what once was real, now
nothing more than hallucination, I stole
in the night that chimaera, that dream, that envy,
my body of vine-esque envies,
wiry & spindling, helixed, hexagonal pattern
on vine-built bodies, intertwining in light,
stitching skin together, moss-eaten,
full of aphids, gnashing at ribbons
torn from ugly flesh.
Noah David Roberts is a non-binary poet based in Philadelphia, PA. Roberts is the author of 6 collections, including Mutable Forests (Kith Books, 2023). Since publication of their first book, Roberts has been published in Bullshit Lit, Tribes Magazine, Horror Sleaze Trash, and more. In 2022, Roberts won the Judith Stark poetry contest. They are a 2023 Pushcart nominee. They are the host of the monthly poetry reading Scribes on South.