2 poems by Patrycja Humienik

---

Kissing Like There’s No Place Else

I lost my phone, location undisclosed.

It is not dislocation I’m after but being moved

the way a picture was for the very first time. 

My first French kiss was at the movies. Kiss me!

like we are the history of cinema. Pull my hair, 

cradle the head, call all the bees 

to an impossibly wide field, unthought 

in the pouring rain, where we’re rolling now, 

down the hill past the glow of meadows, other loves, 

whole seasons, the pulse the thaw the milk

the sting, no shore we can see, out to shipwreck.

Living to give ourselves away. I would do it again. 

I Can’t See My Insides

I pretend to make a movie 

out of my morning as I abandon the bed.

Flicker of muscle and running, 

the light-sensitive emulsion of dreams 

cut. When people ask how I’m doing, 

I participate reluctantly. I know I’m not the only one 

thinking about death, 

abstracted daily in the headlines. 

I’m tired of complaining but I don’t want to lie.

A man looks at me too long on the petal-slick sidewalk. 

These petals have let go, are pink simply. 

Ferrying to my eyes their pigment in little baskets.

To receive but not consume. 

Sidewalk tables full of visually appealing disorder,

food and beverages I can’t have; a family

on the corner holding three fistfuls of balloons;

the hibiscus lips of a woman 

making strong eye contact with me

while a small dog winds the leash 

around her ankles. 

What I want to see happen next

requires a protagonist with nerve.

There is a scene in which I betray myself, 

looking directly into the camera, saying I chose this.

---

Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer and editor based in Seattle, WA. Her poetry is featured/forthcoming in Gulf Coast, The Adroit Journal, TriQuarterly, SAND Journal Berlin, 128 Lit, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Slowdown show, and elsewhere. She is working on her first book of poems, Anchor Baby. Find Patrycja on twitter @jej_sen.

---

5 June 2023