Two Poems

Rachel Rabbit White

Rachel Rabbit White is the author of Porn Carnival (Wonder, 2019). The following poems appear in its expanded reissue Porn Carnival: Paradise Edition (Wonder, 2020), which is now available for pre-order.

Read Katie Ebbitt’s interview with Rachel here.

Romeo

there’s nothing I can tell you

that you don’t already know through ESP

how loving you is held in my spine 

so long as I live I could flashback suddenly

we walk down the street, I can’t stop

biting your neck as you steer me from traffic

I laugh, wish, wouldn’t it be nice

to see no future torment in a face of heaven so fine

to love you as I do breaks me at the height of it

Romeo and Juliet were spared, 

you once said, from inevitability 

Juliet pregnant and Romeo fucking around

I hated when you said that

one day I will start living for myself again

abrupt, cleansed

when what gives the stars meaning

the no forever of everything 

it should be enough

what was I thinking, to let you go…

I don’t know, I don’t know…

the payphone is about to hang up

fuck, something inaudible 

I love you, but the line is gone

canopied beneath karmic madness

your mistake was to think/ I’m too worthy of happiness

that I could find good yet

let ruin have its way

I’m the Montague now

I survived those detoxes

I killed Tybalt

I robbed thirteen banks

your mistake was to think we have two names

over the lifespan of the abyss

this will repeat in ages

we were never more ourselves that day 

how we burned down the carpet

so we could dance

slow, curtained

in our own afflictions, 

oppressed together

by the soft throw of a candle/ from the floor

the color of blush, 

a subset of red, 

historically rare

the day was ours rosily

to be alone in you, I swear

I won’t think a single thought

about the nights I stood

at the window of your death

and looked out/ starry in utter blackness

where the angel came on dissociative drugs

and said: don’t break up with him yet

the crime of the future

and the notorious past

dawn came again gently

and again broke my will

in eerie tender fatigue

these days we all tell each other

you’ll be okay

you say be careful~and take my hand in the street

but I’d like her to come for me, right here

if we don’t get it right in this lifetime

a spiral is bound to repeat

if we run it into the ground

didn’t we see it for real 

step into the sun

a shadow disappears

in the other version of night

I remember the light softly

walking down Havemeyer

hair stuck to lip gloss

waiting at a bodega corner

I search “memory loss”

“short term memory loss”

the autumn inside me is brief 

a vestige, virginal

golden hour, golden day, bracelet, your hair

in sunlight you notice my irises change 

when the rich began hoarding gold

when the city is shut down

and the working girls

are going back to work,

touring, rates lowering

“but you’re not happy” you keep saying

and I don’t know if I am or what

the dread of leaving you begins the night,

two days, three days before

the past chose its weather

its habit of drinking 

scotch left from glasses/ the night before

take the pill sporadically

I pass through a day like a stranger to its hours,

like a house guest, unsure of where things are put away

I hear myself call your name

in some distant placement

to a night, warm, unrelenting,

illuminating thousands of inevitabilities 

the whirring silence of household appliances

as we shift from one room to another

to have you right where I can have you

you say there’s a sadness in my smile

call me baby-girl again

I say “the girlfriend experience” 

like there’s a hidden meaning

what it means for you to love me, 

whose job is to hide that I am someone’s girlfriend

I remember laying in bed

thinking all that gratuitous work to pretend 

we’re forever available and available now

when of course, all along

they know the score

to be used against you

sabotaged

for a seemingly endless

labor

any fixed personality I once had

memory erases that too

devouring the hour and the next 

don’t stop until it will be okay

until one of us goes free

until one of us goes too far

tonight I am married/ to my heaviness

and to not knowing/ a thing about consequences

I remember if I open my arms

and lift with a running start

I can glide, up up, spontaneous

into the atmosphere

I’ve always known how to do this…

how could I have forgotten?

I wake softly and say put a baby in me

you say fuck it, let’s do it now

I try to imagine a future

but in truth I cannot

we could've been a past 

that never happened

but it’s too late now

I dream a crime sewer

I dream you set off to find a ladder

in the other version of night

where it isn’t this way

wake in sheets and blankets

stained with self-tanner

everyday I choose 

something, surely springing

from some innate source

torment, splendor, chaos

dread begins earlier and earlier

and the smell of it counted now

in stacks green gold transparent 

sickens

luck or risk

money or ethics 

gave me this sickness

this is coming from my throat

this is coming from wherein 

I occupy a bold amount of sky

and think about the last time I entered an ocean

completely naked