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Garth Pavell Poetry

Try Not

by Garth Pavell

 

Try not to eat meat on the Chinese New Year
my girlfriend teased, egging on my fragile new
vegetarianism poking out like a pot-bellied silhouette
of a newborn leaf quivering in a cage-free wind.

I arrived at Wongs restaurant where her family occupied
four round red quadrants: immigrants and first generation
Americans mostly at the children’s table, which is where
we sat since chairs were scarce in the old country.

Her century-old grandmother crooned when the piglets
were brought out, eyeless faces charred to horrific perfection.
One teen saw videos online about the horrors of factory farming
so he supported (in theory for now) boycotting corporatized cattle.

I told him most people don’t realize protein-packed edible art
remains unknitted in the patchwork of our veggie sweater. I said
gold-leafed beechnuts and rosy-hued crabapples fall like confetti
as we breed and feed livestock under wrinkled rotting sunsets.

But then the Mongolian beef arrived with mashed plums and garlic.
I chewed the boneless flesh realizing it was seasoning that I craved.
I drank cold-hearted Tsingtao beer and picked at the seared scallions
until a plate of sliced oranges arrived to purify the cow’s candied blood.

 

 

 

The World Is Missing

 

I can see it in the faces of empty-headed subways at midnight or when the pavement follows me to the undiagnosed part of town. I can feel it while looking through my cross-eyed window at the rain in the alley lit by a dazed streetlamp where a homeless poet panhandles for stamps to send a letter back in time. He once told me the moon’s chipped tooth smiles upon a midwest wine-colored river where he fished as a boy and later got lucky before eventually hitching his way across the vascular highway.

The sugar-junky yuppie across the hall is perennially out of milk, bread, toilet paper and cigarettes but she doesn’t mind asking as long as snickerdoodle cookies bake into the counterclockwise ruminations of her brain. When we cram conversation in the elevator, she directs the naked truth like a go-go dancer that can’t be touched. I once kissed her sugarcoated lips; it was Friday and we were blowing off a week of words when the power went out. We opened our doors and made our candlelit bodies into personified furniture.

 

 

 

Looking Up

 

the other day I read how our Milky Way is destined to collide
with the all-night party permeating through the Andromeda galaxy

which gives one’s family tree a future forest of speculative poets
tinsel to testify that we’re on track for something infinitely touchable

surely you’ve heard between slutting in front of social media’s mirror
as the evolution of revolution bloodlessly streams captured kings

into soon to be corporatized countries coming in for a huddle
like fish must feel in depths we can only perceive by looking up

 

 

 

BIO

Garth Pavell writes stories, poems and songs. His writing most recently appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Main Street Rag and Mudfish. Garth works for an international animal welfare nonprofit in New York City.

 

 

 

The Writing Disorder is a quarterly literary journal. We publish exceptional new works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction and art. We also feature interviews with writers and artists, as well as reviews.

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