Alexandra Weiss: 3 Poems

eating cherries, waiting for the storm

it's monsoon season in the high desert and the surgery's two weeks from today. in 14 days i'll be back from albuquerque, tucked into bed. a little less scared, a lot more drugged, but for now all i can do is go through the motions of last time, staring at my phone or watching storm clouds close in on santa fe, struggling to leave the house or remember what day it is. but i recall that you come to town tomorrow, and that's something worth leaving my room for, worth cleaning up for, so i picked up the dead flies from the shower floor today, and now i'm eating cherries from the tree in the yard. they're not quite ripe yet, still sharp with yellow showing through with fine dots of red—stick n' poke or chromatophores on cuttlefish—always changing color. i picked the cherries quickly, not wanting to be at the top of the ladder when the clouds broke and the thunder came. it still hasn't rained, but they look so real in grandma's desert colored dishware, shining yellow-pink in the coffee cup, seeds drying out on the saucer.

​love in the time of the dobbs decision

​being sterile is the second best
feeling after getting to love you
and be loved by you

​i will never incubate new life
i will take this disease to my
grave without passing on this curse

​nobody can tell me how to use this body
i know what it's for and
what i want:
to be your boyfriend
and to love you
until i die

​a bee stung you there among the willows

in the cemetery shed cicada casings still clutch pine branches and bark for dear (spent) (non)life and i weave my fingers tighter into your hair. you, my throat, knife blade on skin to make it real. moss on the graves, birds calling through late summer afternoon, you not really caring for cemeteries, me loving them as long as they're not forest lawn, so many identical stones, teeth waiting to swallow you up rather than space to sit, think, (give in to) rot. where strangers visit, squirrels play while you dissolve, body feeding flowers of remembrance, lilacs, elegies. stuck outside time, frozen, plastic, sitting pretty for the formal holidays. under all this grass the dead lie waiting for nothing, waiting i suppose for the final cremation when the sun goes red giant and engulfs it all

Alexandra Weiss is a gardener whose apartment is slowly being taken over by spider plants and lemongrass. They've published two chapbooks, autumn is when the ghosts come out (Blanket Sea Press, 2022) and obituary for my hot sauce shelf (Bottlecap Press, 2023), and they have another forthcoming from Querencia Press.