Four Poems

Laura Theobald

ANCESTOR POEM

My heart was calling out to you but you were wearing headphones

It was like getting your period at a funeral

It was like being run over by a train-shaped cloud

What if I still felt like a person?

Then I would not feel like a not-person

Then my sense of worth would no longer depend on

How much you like me at any given moment

It would be like solving a long equation

It would be like watching my ancestor fall off a roof

TOMATO POEM

Boy-child you drove tricycle over me while pulling my hair

It was thoughtful kind of

But I was afraid that you were going to get hurt

I am totally confused

I can’t wait to keep being exactly the same

It will be like having a circulatory system made out of lightening

And skin like a tomato

And sleeping on a trampoline every night

DIAMOND POEM

You are like a painting that has been painted over

With a less beautiful painting

I wanted to take you to an emergency shelter

I wanted to be at least as important as real estate

When I couldn’t fix anything I just burned it down

Then I was just like everybody else

Then I did nothing

Then I was like nobody at all

It was like putting a bandage on a corpse

It was really unoriginal

It was my responsibility to make people care

But all I could think about was a diamond the size of a fist

ISLAND POEM

You cherished me like something that cannot yet be experienced online

I tried to stuff you entirely into my snatch like a stack of envelopes

I insisted on becoming very useless to myself

I built an island and watched you torch it

Like some kind of hideous adult

The only thing left is to never think of you again

Even as you are tossing me out of a boat

Sometimes you can know someone believes in you

When they are trying to kill you

In fact if I am not bludgeoned to death with a musical instrument

I will call you a pussy

If I am caught dead without gum in my hair

I will never say you are a true gangster

If you are looking for the bottom it is probably already in you

Laura Theobald is a PhD student in poetry and creative writing at UGA in Athens. She’s the author of Kokomo (Disorder, 2019) and What My Hair Says About You (Metatron, 2017), plus three chapbooks. She received an MFA from LSU, where she served as the editor of the New Delta Review, and works for small press publishers OOMPH! and BOAAT. Her poetry has appeared in jubilat, The Volta, Hobart, Peach Mag, The Atlas Review, Everyday Genius, and Black Warrior Review, among others, and in the anthology Women of Resistance.