Paul Corman-Roberts is the author Bone Moon Palace from Black Lawrence Press (2021) a CLMP Firecracker nominated full length poetry collection. He is also author of the graphic chapbook The Sincere (with illustrator Ray Swaney) from Libran Apocalypse Books (2022.) He is a founder and current organizer of the Beast Crawl Lit Festival in Oakland CA. He currently teaches workshops for the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute. He sometimes fills in as a drummer for the U.S. Ghostal Service, The Jennifer Blowdryer Band and the Poznansky Sisters, but mostly he is just exhausted.
Leaving Las Vegas
The desert
is a place of miracles
and arrowheads
spelling out glyphs that tell
me if I don't want to starve
I better finish college
so I research and daydream
the inhabitants of lost folklore
into beings I can see
here, now, so
I lose track of my decades,
but remain clear about yours
(of course)
wishing Lucy and Ethel
would finally break down
and give in to that thing
between them
where they tear each other's dresses off completely.
Instead,
they both fire me.
and that's when you and I marry
so that now I require
those very specific drips of starlight
on the days you write like a demon
a forest of drips, always showing my emotions
always showing up on my skin
sometimes we count the wrong things
in the wrong parts of the sky
gathered here like puzzle pieces
sloshing inside the amniotic fluids
we never stop believing
in their capability
to heal us back together.
