Where Is Your Warm Gun?

FOURTH OF JULY
​Feng Sun Chen

Sometime, said the paper queen, you will cease to be loved.
Maybe you will be lucky
and a kind witch will tell you why. It's probably your personality,
for example. You will not understand your pain,
which is shaped like a windmill and moves
by the tug of a horrible moon
but you may learn to live with it, or forget it
for longer and longer stretches.
In this case, the story must rest
on my profound endurance.
What a long time I have gone on! Even after the baby dropped
and happiness has proven itself to parts of the world
like glow on a map of electric consumption,
a country of darkness
wrung with glitter. I want to kill
you, with my glittering heart. I can never stop
until I do. But I am small.
Maybe, said the magi vole, you are too small.
Maybe, said the naked mole, you will have to give up, or somehow
eat it up from the inside.
There are other things to think about, said the princess
in a dress made of leaves, such as art. Where is your warm gun?
​Let freedom sprout. Show me how you love.
Spangled one, how precarious and plump you look
perched on a white fence. Happiness, said the paper
beggar, who is really a god,
comes from within. Oh, how he hobbles! Look on, look on.
He is richer than you. There are forces 
much larger at work here,
humming about like godmothers.
I am small, I am small. Here comes the parade! All that beauty!
I want to die! I want to die!
​I want to die!

from Feng Sun Chen's Butcher Tree
recommended by Janaka Stucky

​SOMETIMES, SAID THE PAPER QUEEN, YOU WILL CEASE TO BE LOVED
Adam Stone

Playing chess with death is 
centuries cliche but connect-four goes by so
quickly I ask love if he is
comfortable playing something like
risk And when he laughs i tell him i'm not trying to be
clever I just know how easily it is for you to
conquer me Tonight i want to 
savor that feeling into tomorrow and as many
tomorrows as you will
humor me

Love's humor is
complex Monopoly also seems like a joke I just don't know
many games What i ask love do you and death like to
play when you're alone? How i didn't guess
twister i'm ashamed to contemplate

Desire which sometimes dresses like love but always gets the
makeup wrong asks if i still own a box of apples to
apples As if i didn't long ago give up
asking my friends to judge me against my other friends

When i was a child i would play hungry
hungry hippos against myself Left hand versus right Two
hippos dormant Which i've come to learn is when they're most
dangerous in the wild

Video games then? I ask depression
He doesn't answer