Poetry: “LOLO, I MADE IT INTO THE IVY-CRESTED ROOM BUT THE WALLS ARE SLOWLY DIGESTING ME” by Kimberly Ramos
LOLO, I MADE IT INTO THE IVY-CRESTED ROOM BUT THE WALLS ARE SLOWLY DIGESTING ME
the glitz : the lanterns we left tattered and flickering down by the waterways : the long black wraith of your hair : the howling on all fours : the beer foam trickling down our chins and necks : at first a cold ambrosia, then sticky, warm, attracting flies : weekends spent wild-shifting : but then by morning our lithe furless bodies were traipsing through libraries : we were well-behaved and beautiful by the tall windows : copies of Darwin and Sartre in our laps : evenings we drank hot wax so it would cool and harden like an opal in our bellies : then the inevitable candle sleep : the light in pits all along the river : we were enamored with the glint of silver and the way it could be eaten to produce lustrous babies for generations afterward : we scoured the archives for the mention of a drawstring bag fat with moonfire : we desperately filed down our teeth in the dorm bathrooms : o god make my two front teeth straight and flat, glossy like two opals : o god i want to be skinny-pretty like the cardigan girls : and yet we could not stop salivating : we lusted after family crests : we prayed for purchase in the smoke-dense parlor rooms : you once told me you would only feel full when the secret to everything was unspooled and laid out in front of you : the long gold thread webbed through the ribs of moths pupating and silent : this lasting obsession with metamorphosis : the alchemy of one body becoming another body : it was your eye, so close to the scalpel I swear I saw your pupil shudder like an insect downed in the water
About Kimberly Ramos
Kim Ramos is a queer Filipina writer from Southern Missouri. They currently reside in Providence, Rhode Island, as a graduate student of philosophy at Brown University where they study consent and sexual ethics. Their debut chapbook, Alive, Today, Again! was the first-runner up of the 2023 Flume Press Chapbook Contest and selected for publication. They are also the author of The Beginner’s Guide to Minor Gods and Other Small Spirits (Unsolicited Press, 2023). Their work is previously published or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Lantern Review, and Quarterly West, among others. They dream of becoming a giant rabbit and haunting the Midwest. You can read more of their work at kimramoswrites.carrd.co