it is 4am, the night is starless & seductive,
ravaged with sweat oiling the screws
of two bodies
athirst to obey the wheels to their bareness—
with all these desires, the body does not want to
wear celibacy as a skin but to be burned
into ashes
like the way, emperor Nero burned Rome
in this room cloaks with blackness & moans,
adele is standing between me & God
& the smell of iced tea is in the air
housewife #26
my mother’s voice rises like a school’s flag
this morning it rose above the mist
of her tea mug
it reaches into the flesh of a song
playing on the tv. it sprouts out
of her body like what a tired tree root
does to the soil
today there is a joy in my mother’s voice
her tongue has been hungry for
i called mama into my room
& beg my her to stay like this for us
mama looks into my face,
her eyes softening into a wet soil
and said:
‘’son, every day cannot be my birthday
i was born once like all mothers’’
housewife #10
i pleasure myself by clogging our kitchen sink
the lips of the faucet are wet with desire
i can hear my cousins hounding mother’s cats
around the living room—
it has been ten years since mother evolved
into this art of a woman giving up her life for a man
my mother’s life as a housewife is a battlefield
but i keep telling myself that
her body is a rehab’s wall of Jericho that
falls to nothing, & a discreet God
is the one who knows mother’s secrets
and hears her cries we have never heard
from outside of her room
About The Author
Jeremy Teddy Karn is the author of Miryam Magdalit (APBF & Akashic Books, 2021). His works have recently appeared/are forthcoming in Olney Magazine, The Penn Review, Poetry Wales, Whale Road, Lolwe, Cheat River Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Native Skin, and elsewhere. He is the EIC at Pepper Coast Lit. He tweets @jeremy_karn96