Lauren Levin

A poem to live forever and be forgotten immediately

Apple tree its elegant blossom
For dogs not gods

Olive oil and salt
Fat butter

My spit on a pen
in your mouth

Lilac dirt in my hair

What’s more ancient
To change or not

The toughness of lapis lazuli
is Fair
Do not shower in it

Yellow diamond, gypsum
black diamond, chalk
ruby, a fingernail, sapphire
orthoclase, knife blade

The pungency
of wild onions
Aloft the air

The ideal reader would not be fickle

But the reader is fickle

The eye is fickle

And the mind

Murmuring, laughter,

The good and bad taste
of a season

Effervescence, harsh sunlight,
poems about fucking, soft sunlight
Forgotten words that hang there
rotating just out of reach
Ale saying potato cream
instead of peanut butter

Poems about fucking

Leaving a party
then circling back again

How beautiful
this fairweather friend

Why I’ve failed

to remember the future

Because of death I’m afraid
To be serious

Ozzy snorting a line
of live ants

The Sappho fragments
To be discovered
after I die

Ramona holds the bloom
of a nylon rose
Between her paws

Chews at the stem

The tattoo I’m going to get

The tattoo I was going to get

A little tarnished
A little dirty

What’s in your past

Is in your future too

You opened the door

Your hair wet
Black and lavender

What is as eternal as your smile
was to me then

With your eyes cast down

My delight

Shy one

Voices calling unclothe yourself

The moon in the afternoon sky

The obliteration of fruit and flower

Except for my death
I have no secrets

Milk, which lives

and is despoiled
far from home

The taste of water thirsty
vs when you’re sated

Sun fame vs

the ephemeral
fames of the moon

All the Sappho in the Library of Alexandria

My dad said Do you remember the caterpillars

Will someone remember us?
Someone will remember us once

Lauren Levin is a poet and mixed-genre writer, author of Nightwork (Golias Books, 2021), Justice Piece // Transmission (Nightboat Books/Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018), and The Braid (Krupskaya, 2016), which won the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award. With Eric Sneathen, they edited Honey Mine by Camille Roy (Nightboat Books, 2021). Work from their current manuscript Reversi appears in the chapbook Dear Em from eyelet press. Their gender identity is some mix of belated queer, Jewish great-aunt, and aspirational Frank O'Hara. From New Orleans, LA, they live and work in Richmond, CA, and are committed to queer art, intersectional feminism, parenting, and anxiety.