Jeremy Springsteed is a barista living in Seattle. He was one of the founders of the Breadline Performance Series and is one of the organizers of the Chain Letter Performance Series. His work has been published in Raven Chronicles, Mantis, Make It True- Poetry From Cascadia, The Paragon Press, and forthcoming work in Pidgeonholes and Pageboy.
Our Spreading
We left home across ocean.
Virginia hills and bootleg routes,
hand cart Mormon pilgrims.
We move west and when there is no more west
we fall to the shore drinking ocean to expose more land.
We leave our old gods to the east in search of Zion.
When Zion is found we leave the valley in search of Shang-rah-la.
We are sparse like southern Idaho.
We are towering like the Wasatch front.
We are dead fly ridden Great Salt Lake.
There is no upward movement in this clan, only expansion.
Drink drug depraved dreamers.
Silent saints of salt and sky.
Poor chicken coop dwellers,
couch surfers, park campers.
Wanderlust in the veins,
dissatisfaction in the DNA.
We want to be there in our own annihilation.
We open our bodies to offer
nerve and bile
to the unfeeling and the overfilled.
Some drank or drink
or would still drink but they’ve gone to the ground.
Outcast aunt
drank until she had titanium pins put into her ankle
eventually lost that foot because she keep
passing out in the backyard
in the tomatoes,
the hose running everywhere.
Sometimes we wake up in Vegas
with hangover and regret and nothing
but the shirt on the back, even the car gambled away.
Successfully being demoted back to private thirteen times
for drinking, bet fixing, insubordination and still put up for promotion again.
Sight big enough to take in the whole of Pocatello to Walla Wall
and never raise a potato from the earth
We marry and marry and marry again
and eventually just live with our exes
because it’s cheaper rent.
How to Leave Things
Morning marches on my mattress.
I sleep in sheets made of safety pins.
Thrashing through the night
the sheets open. Dreaming pin cushion.
This is the way we keep house.
Then there are fever dreams.
Clouds of mucus tissue fill my ears.
Scrapping myself from bed
to vapor rub.
No one will do this for me now.
I plastic wrap the whole thing.
Sleep six inches above the blankets.
Constantly curious about DNA
and ownership and who looks through my trash.
I sleep up here and dust bust every chance I get.
The mattress knows every inch of me,
has a me shaped depression.
This is why it must go.
No more night-sweat-mares.
No longer a drunken moan.
No other sleepers
for I am a jealousy sleeper.
Set on fire
in metro tunnel.
The travelers can taste
the smoke of my sleep.