They picked all the eyes from the maple but left a blue one that wasn’t ripe enough

/ Courage could have grown up & died here / Must be pregnant or about to be / I

can’t dance without annoying the middle me // She brought the wrong shoes to the

party / The foam finger you couldn’t throw out was caught dancing with the broken

umbrellas in the shade / The rhythms the water makes are so catchy the horizon

starts dancing / That’s how they make weightless look effortless // Uncle Henry lost

his job as night guard at the paint factory / It wasn’t necessarily vandalism but

management didn’t care for the illumination in the board room / He illuminated so

much shit they couldn’t handle the retribution so they canned him & blamed it on

the weather changing / I’ll be damned if it didn’t work out in everyone’s favor / He

wasn’t using their product / He mixed his own light at home & smuggled it in his

soup thermos / No one had the means to snuff out the light he painted / So now the

sun never sets on the higher ups in their offices / Which means they never sleep &

are constantly calling out / No one checks in on us anymore / We call it the hot box.

Ignore your paresthesia | Go home early

Continue to ignore your paresthesia | Go home early

Continue to ignore your paresthesia | Go home early

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RJ Equality Ingram lives next to a cemetery in Portland, Oregon & works as a necromancer for Goodwill Industries of the Columbia Willamette. RJ's second collection of poetry Peacock Lane is forthcoming from White Stag & RJ's debut collection The Autobiography of Nancy Drew was published in 2024 also by White Stag. More work can be found in Voicemail Poems, Deep Overstock, Luna Luna & Phoebe Journal among others. Follow @RJ_Equality for pictures of their cats Twyla & Senator Padme Amidala.