Two Poems
I AM A DUMB GIRL
It's true!
I am a dumb girl.
I like to braid my hair.
I like to braid my mom.
I like to eat my mom’s hair.
That's why I am a girl.
Dumb girls don’t like to
Fight. But I am half smart!
So I will half fight.
And that kid named Soggy.
He will twist your arm off
And bite it and smush it in his curry.
I will beat you to a pulp
And make fine tasting juice
And I will make millions
And have my money rain down on you
And I will watch you cry.
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING ABOUT ME
Is the night you left me
I spent the whole night crying
My tears of blood
And let them spill all over the floor
And stained the pink shag carpet
And hid behind the orange leather couch.
And never left the house again.
I cried blood all over my hands
And rubbed my hands all over my face
And rubbed my face all over the wall
And painted your face with my face
And used my face to make out with your face
That I made out of my tears of blood.
The most beautiful thing about being
all by myself, is that nobody is there
To clap for me when I least expect it
Or peer pressure me into a night of improv musical theater
Or take off all my clothes without asking for my permission
Or hand me a copy of their 143-paged poetry thesis
on the General Structure of Thomas-Whitehead Gravity
And recite all of it from memory
Without asking for my permission.
Or not look back at me
when they leave the house in a big huff
In the middle of the night
Or crawl into the bathtub
With another woman
And not mention it
Or drink drink after drink after drink
In somebody else's room.
All the men who ever loved me are alcoholics.
I am the only person I know
Who wants to rub her hands all over everything
I refuse to answer the door
Unless it is for the burglars.
I scrub the house clean with bleach.
All so I can ruin it again.
I stand in front of the mirror for hours
And the room fills up
With my tears of blood
I swim in it
And then drink it all up.
It tastes like a steel locket.
A locket kept just for a pig.
Izzy Casey
Izzy Casey received her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was the recipient of a fellowship with the Poetry Foundation. Her poems have been published in or are forthcoming from Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, Black Warrior Review, Bennington Review, The Yale Review, BOAAT, The Columbia Review, NY Tyrant, and elsewhere.
Aurélie Salavert
French artist Aurélie Salavert conveys her thoughts, feelings and memories into pictures that feel as if they were buried in our own subconscious. The thruline of her practice is drawing that continuously reinvents itself through her use of different techniques and styles, allowing a figurative abstraction to emerge. Salavert's vast output of intimate pencil drawings, with their gentle washes of watercolor or flat areas of gouache, speak to us in a childlike clarity, but their meaning remains open. As Stéphane Calais states in the text for the exhibition Une expédition at the Fondation Ricard, Paris, "She is looking for something, at times she finds something, and when she doesn't, we're happy being lost with her."
Aurélie Salavert graduated from the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Marseille in 1990. In 1992, she received a grant from the DRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur - Ministry of Culture. Her work was featured in solo exhibitions at the Galerie Athanor in Marseille and The Calvet Museum in Avignon. A selection of her artworks was acquired for the permanent collections of the Fond Régional d'art Contemporain (Paris) and the Fond National d'art Contemporain (France), and individual works reside in numerous private collections throughout Europe and the United States.