Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

ORINOCO FLOW!

St. Peter
will only let you in
if you pass,
no matter whose rib lay
inside you, throbbing shaft of a
thing. So you say Please?
soft with envy-rot and quirky
with geek culture.
2011 called
so you give back your love
of mustaches, but it’s a sobbing ache
to do so.

Some string lay
like floss between two halves
of a mind and commands:
Tie the Life-Bracelet
that gives you
Mermaid Powers and
wear it like a pride.
—-
you can’t, or don’t, or won’t, and
instead
tuck the given rib in a
hidden place & place a
generational craving
dry on your tongue,
and watch
smoke pillow like dust
around us
and copy the men
who spit their
white fluffed
phlegm.

St. Peter
called and asked you
to justify. He said:
Point
To The Space Where
Life Touched You.
So you materialize
a closing craftstore,
shopping with an aunt
for peach-pink
baby-yarn and
point to the
bag of iridescent beads
for 5.59,
just to swallow
your own lacking
like it’s a surplus,
the million shards of broken
rib stuck in your
throat.

You see Him at the wrong times,
in a bag of chips,
the Mcdonald’s 6 piece.
You see Him, whip in hand, superimposed
on Indiana Jones, killing Nazis
before you knew what
that meant.
Born,
you knew this skin
stretched a tiny too
tight over
a soul meant to be frozen
behind bulletproof glass
next to the weight of elephants, the
stamped golden coin of
Julius Caesar,
backstabbed by 30 men or
was it another
JC? Betrayed
and dripping
in the gold of
sweet and sour.

A reminder, like a gong,
will rip the tissue paper
of your ear drum,
so crack the spine
of the cyan-box, like a book,
and blow.
Say Please?
eyes averted, like a shame

Calla MacGillivray is a queer writer born in Boston, MA, raised in Oswego, IL who now resides back in Quincy, MA. Calla draws inspiration from their personal experiences, history, and nature to form a poem. She is expected to graduate in May 2025 from Bridgewater State University with a degree in English and intends to pursue writing full time. Their work has previously appeared in Bridgewater’s Art Magazine The Bridge.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx