Four Poems
Joshua Edmunds
sky-blue submarine
20,000 leagues under the sea
Fish speak in tongues over their new washer and dryer.
The seriousness of everyday life somersaults in the silence of tomorrow.
In these walls we have never known peace
unless an ending has us right between the eyes.
In these walls pupils dart across the room sheepishly scanning for judgemental inhales
and half-seen lips.
squeeze and shake
blooms and blossoms
hips&thighs enchant
Every fiber of my being.
I remember so much. The nowness overwhelms, binds me
in a burlap casket of my dreams.
raven taunts
it’s as if the sun,
endlessly taunting the light,
dares us to start the staring contest.
the speed in which vision is lost
deserves its own prayer
curious minds never satisfied with words
i’ve seen the new future
lurking in the sparkling Mediterranean
or the asbury shore
ghost remnants
The 35mm portals take me nowhere.
Dazzling reds and swampy greens and smitten yellows and broadcast smiles and moisturized hair
and outreached arms and hands strung with trust. Tangled paintings and lifeless squishmellows
and empty cans of Minute Maid lemonade and Saturdays in April filled with silence.
one bomb
detonates in the middle of our intestines
as your lips give form:
“I never want to see you again.”
another crumbles
halfway through every memory i have of you
simmers in black fountain pen.
i know
family illnesses infuse with the dream of being.
i know
why i wrote it all down.
One bright violet blob lists every drug we did together. Another replays every time we saw each
other cry.
The nostalgia is over! There is only now
Memories entrap the steel of the heart, encase it in magma.
Your voice was once a fountain.
No Eye Left Unturned
we know your type.
shower and exercise twice a day. never skip a meal. overload on beef jerky and nature
documentaries and amphetamines. go to the theater and ridicule every animal lover. I trace your
limbs and bright pink segments come gushing out. You tell me you’ve never been in love before.
you breath and its a sudden stutter. you have a primal urge to be held on trains. you get the
number seven two cheeseburger meal at mcdonalds.
My name to you was “frenetic blues. a woman on the drums, thrashing in the yolk of the
summer.”
The country that we build out of this one’s ashes will be called “On The New Rules For
Destroying Countries.”
In the socialist sauna all the rats wear sunglasses and network with your grandparents.
Joshua Edmunds hails from Belleville, New Jersey. He graduated from Rutgers in May 2023 and studied Journalism and Media Studies. Joshua writes, “I love reading and writing poems and find literature very inspiring. I couldn’t live without it.”