Julia Cohen

Hot Cold

4 lemons for a dollar I skirt down the avenue saying 'close to my hurt' not looking at a visible object say my name three times and what happens

So much of it and now nothing

The heart's muscle tattooed on her back like a fish fin’s fake eye when she said composure I heard enclosure and clamored out and away to my gangly limbs waiting in the meadow for a good risk she cooks chicken for the wishbone wish I wash away like the cup's coffee ring 'for chance's sake'

My hands come back to me in the 24 hour bodega the clerk hands me free cigarettes I never smoke but take them anyways as bricks for my castle

What is most important to you cannot be alphabetized is touch a visible thing? there is no such thing as opposites surprised? you shouldn't be everything its own animal

She took my typewriter ribbon to wrap the present I never find
Cold colder getting warmer cold again

Julia Cohen lives in Brooklyn and is the Marketing Director for Nightboat Books (we just published Fanny Howe's new poetry book), a fiction reader for Small Spiral Notebook, and an editorial assistant at Palgrave Macmillan. Her poems have been published in Can We Have Our Ball Back?, How2,  Hanging Loose, GutCult, Boog City, Word For/Word and Pindeldyboz, and are forethcoming in Octopus #7, H_NGM_N, The Tiny, and Aught. Feel free to reach her at Julia.Cohen@nightboat.org