RH2: RETAIL NEVER SLEEPS > POETRY

How Can You Not Rip Yourself To Shreds, Shedding The Truth Of Each Day

By hannah rubin

I am a walking breathing
miser. A sack of potatoes overgrown  

with desire to feel the only true feeling:
the rush of a small red heart being  

clicked. Jubilant and received
tickled in the upper edge of my cunt  

where pleasure is stored and sought
after. I am celibate in bed with my lesbian  

mourning, tired and lighting a candle
embedded with shards of jade  

that beam green, able to withstand
the hungry force of fire’s yellow oval  

sucking greedily at the air devouring it
as I devour as we devour as I am devoured  

everything owned by someone else
every phone call answered by a woman  

in Bangladesh. Each month more numbers
are subtracted from my lump of numbers 

numbers I need in order to make it 
numbers that people take for things I want  

Like fresh olive bread
and blue eggs with thick  

orange yolks. These numbers swell
and stutter, I can not hold onto them  

I race them across the entirety of my life. 

hannah rubin is a writer and interdisciplinary artist based in LA. They also are and have been: a digital communications manager, front-of-house everything (cashier, waiter, barista, host’ess: you name it & it’s happened), artist assistant, newspaper staff writer, seventh grade teacher, farmhand, artist residency manager, & … Their work explores queer ecologies of gender and relationships, and has appeared in TAGGVERK, Cordite Poetry Review, Pornstar Martini Magazine, BRINK, Bombay Gin, and elsewhere. 

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