I send spent lilies to your doorstep & jot down a fiasco in the same bouquet
& the same density of muddled lines living in our home that always hovers
just above monotony & medications of lingering staleness & pause &
realign my back like it’s a party trick just for the dark word of the couch to
receive my body & you can find me in the living room like loose change
gathering insults & how many skins can I shed before I reach the bone &
hover above the rust while I write inquisitions & envy songs at twilight
just for you & find gold in couplets designed to disguise stifling & what I
mean to say is these bad habits are like futile grocery lists to unpack
dysregulation & let your interiority hang out & tie you to a chair for a few
hours & welcome the slow pressure cooker & mutate into complications
denser than the sunrise’s lies & let’s have coffee & fruit & then provocation

Published 30th December, 2023.
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Adam Stutz is the Editor-In-Chief/Publisher of The Broken Lens Journal and the author of Transcript (Cooper Dillon Books, 2017), The Scales (White Stag Publishing, 2018), The Sham Tapestry (White Stag Publishing, 2024), and Compunctions + Thefts (White Stag Publishing, 2024). His work was recently shortlisted for The Capilano Review's 2023 Writing Contest: Writing in the Aftermath, and has appeared in various print and online publications including The Equalizer: Second Series, A Sharp Piece of Awesome, Prelude, Be About It, Deluge, Dum Dum Zine, The Pinch, Dodging the Rain, Where is the River, Dream Pop, Cover, Ghost Proposal, Columba Poetry, Only Good Poems, INKSOUNDS, Spectra Poets, Trilobite, and hush: a journal of noise. His work can also be found at https://stutzwrites.com He currently resides in Los Angeles, CA.