E m i l y H u n e r w a d e l —

Complaints As Wishes

I wish I hadn’t twisted

and wrung out my thinking

to find nothing tangible

and an audience at my door.

I wish the relationship

between control

and tenderness

wasn’t so tenuous,

but instead, I’m here

discovering that

distraction is the

anti-hero of desire.

Meanwhile,

the lobby guy

informs me

that someone tried

to burn down your hotel

while you were sleeping,

protesting her room’s

lack of tiny soaps.

I wish my own need for vices

didn’t come from my fear of boredom.

I wish boredom was a compass

directing you out of your

unburnt hotel room.

I wish I could feel

the benefits of doubt

or at least break through

the film of comparison

to find some secret truth

about what it means

to be exactly your age.

Instead,

the named thing

stays cemented to the floor

while the name

floats above

and pops

Spoke Season

— a seasonal appearance of mysterious spokes in Saturn’s rings

Even as this blushing night

gets its loan from nothingness to live,

the sky spits its dust on me,

and so, to stay one step ahead

of winter’s emotional texture,

I’m tapping into the solar wind

of soft reasoning.

Science seems incapable

of catching up to this

loserly thinking,

even as all their tech

anticipates my touch

and all my AI portraits

come out naked.

O insufferable me!

Me with my

psycho-semantics.

The science says

rebrand yourself as a moving target,

so I adopt a cat and name her Misery,

inflate myself

with whispered secrets,

let excellence slip through my fingers

to be relieved of the weight

.