Anne Barngrover & Avni Vyas

VINTAGE GALLERY OF OUR RUINED AFFAIR

Foxes are the new owls are the new bluebirds. I forget to miss you,
forget to pine or oak or beech you. Nothing is fashionable anymore except
jewelry that might electrocute or a craft hour where you build a pipe bomb.
Flannel, bagels and cappuccinos are a time capsule back to feminism—
but I still don't know how to take it when you say I look sexy when I cry. Prick
the plastic of a hermetically sealed dream state. It is unspeakably
dirty now at sunset: orange bowl with a fat tomato, clouds stretched as gauze.
You cannot make love au courant without a wig, maybe a false mole
and silicone cheekbones. Once we ate cheese fries in bed and you confessed
your father was a vacuum cleaner and you, a mohair stool. Décor can't pretty
up the knots in your eyes, your stomach full of yarn. Hunker down
beneath the sheep, little Ulysses. No red-eyed monster will find you if you slap
your face with clay. We love each other so bad we go kiss other people
because, again, the magazines make it look so glossy, so suede, pigskin, calf.

Anne Barngrover earned her MFA at Florida State and is currently a PhD candidate at University of Missouri. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly, and elsewhere. Avni Vyas lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida where she is pursuing a PhD in Poetry. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Meridian, Crab Orchard Review, Gargoyle, River Styx, and others.