profileElena Gomez co-hosts the occasional apartment poetry series, CELL, and co-edits SUS press. She is the author of two chapbooks, CHILL FLAKES (SUS press) and PER, a collaborative work with Eddie Hopely (Make Now Books). Her work can also be found online, at The Claudius App and Cordite.

  

Sweeping leaves is a weekly chore

she liked [found pleasure in it]
       to click her tongue and displace

a wire & plastic retainer while
       staring into the faces of young

children who turned to seek out
       strangers on the south-west bus.

I prefer to describe myself
as plucky rather than as

allergic to scholarship
though it becomes easier

to feign allergy if one embodies
the disease-like components of

it such as limp limbs,
a dim eye

an untended ‘garden’
         [to chuckle now would be rude].

the very minute you admit weakness
of literal concepts a fresh spring air

takes hold and carries you forth
to the edge of the football field.

you swoon at the thought of dialectics
not a swoon from desire but from

an overwhelming sense of the walls that
close in you also must perfect the

blank stare, the short-tempered child-like
frustration that occasionally

very occasionally, involves hurling
a remote through a nearby doorway.

would have preferred to be visited
by the ghost of alma mahler.

the beauty of names is they can inspire
thoughts of pleasantness in a woman.

I used to be afraid of long lines, the way
they snaked across a page the way they

furiously eluded my grasp, which already
was a weak sick thing.