In summer I shed something / Something is Understood

In summer I shed something

Watch over my remains, will you, as I step

from my reeling body, as I prepare to land, eyes open,

heart in a plastic cup rattling on the tray table, skidding

in springtime sleet with my hair tied in tangles

to the overhead oxygen mask — I’ve killed myself

so many times. Now, suddenly, I know how to protect myself.

Pocket knife against the stag, a necessary stake-out,

the least I can do for the kid who must reincarnate, reincarnate.

What I share with them now is pain, we eat it fast like pancakes,

revel in it — we know things now. I feel myself dying, again.

Outside it’s all light like lemon juice. Sour. Between the stag’s ears

it’s all soft velvet, it makes me wonder if the bone is soft, too,

plush and porous, and you, hacking out a clearing,

with a deer skull hanging over your fireplace at home, burning

rocking horse remains and me. It seems I’ve been broken enough

I’ve learned to love the destroyer. It seems you’ve eaten enough bones

to know they don’t nourish.

Something is Understood

In still-bloated air you ask yourself what do you do

with this new, healed body, with the hollow rocking horse

housed too close to the matchbox; suddenly you are the fuel

to the flame, the crescendo, the piano through the

window, peddling your plight; you wonder, can you sell the years

you didn’t like living, and who would you sell them to:

Those who have too many summer memories,

or those who have forgotten; I know there is a certain

type of warmth out there that washes, like melted butter,

piss yellow, I know it has touched me before and it

will touch me again; if ghosts were real they’d be from L.A., where

it's hot enough to melt the sun, to glaze the sidewalks with it,

where faith is a halo of heat wrapped around our skulls,

gauze-like, taunting. Dress me in stripes and corduroy. Love me,

guide me, call me quaint. Maybe they’re here undercover after all,

wheeling us around with a crystalline awareness, sugarspun.

Maybe you’re darting out your tongue to feel it, cotton candy

dissolving at your open lips.

By Dylan R. Ragas

—In their column “Yard Sale Organs,” Dylan R. Ragas ’26 creates poems that attempt to make sense of a past — real, imagined, but mostly somewhere in between. They can be reached at dylan.ragas@thecrimson.com.