TRASH BAG SPEECH

Jess Liu

Trash bag speech

Trash bags sleep
a liquid mess

bucket of oil
dyed hair black

dredge up more
liquid from post-
operational chests

pleats and folds
leak out

graphemes

extra needles
surgical hand shed

rolling its cart down
clavicle ramps

I heave my own
inverse skin

luxuriate on strips
of untrimmed night

cruise a breeze

drift above holes
shovels arbitrate
in sand

negative mouths

sleep expresses
natural fluidity

I retch passively
before I tumble,
tumble down
the drain

logistical error

trash bag doesn’t
care how it looks

no one is looking for it

concave my chest
over this world

vault for oxygen
tumbling in the heap
trying to forget

solid dimension

muttering, muttering
producing more waste

never been so close
to other

trash bags crushing
my own trash body

where should I fill out the forms

Jess Liu is a queer poet from the Midwest and an MFA Fellow at UMass Amherst. Recent work is in Protean, Antiphony, and Seam Allowance, or on jessliu.net.