/jeremy radin

Confessions of a Star Eater

No two are alike in taste. Some caramel. Some currency. Some you could not conceive of if you tried. Please— your honor, do not try. I warn you, I am restless. Comets careen within me. My body’s sole feature: it does not stop growing. A moment ago did I say love or eat? It amuses me, the idea of a difference. More flavors: burnt soldier, birch bark, the sex organs of a certain species of angel. I cracked a swollen one in half & shivering lizards were packed inside. If this seems disordered to you, perhaps consider the glossy magazines you stack beside your toilet. If this is a villainy, morning’s a villainy. I’m a disappearist; a form-defuser. Another was a frozen eye—for a century I was assailed by visions: weapons hung from the ceiling of the temple, an interrogator burst from her ex-lover’s heart. Are you trying, your honor, to imagine what could love a thing like me? Does your imagination flatter you? The clouds after war, the death of mathematics, what escapes a cello when a cello is broken. I have seen you wake up sweating in the middle of the night, certain your beauty’s amounted to nothing. Ah, when you signal with your eyes like that, your honor, you are magnificent. You mustn’t permit me to swindle you. I am nothing more than a common thief, an ant in the crumbs of a banquet.

An Eating Disorder is a Body Without Organs

Again I drag my body into the meadow, cradling a shotgun. Medicine scrambling through the unhappy systems— Metformin, Lisinopril, Lipitor, & Prozac for the chartreuse mind.

The meadow rises like the ribs of a dozing animal. Furred, swollen, I feel it swelling, a dreaming sheepdog, the body a catastrophe of watersongs & butter. All a meadow has

to offer is its body. I offer my confusion & my love, still in its original packaging. I offer my memories, dance moves where the arms become mystical S’s—S for sunsyrup, sugarslumber.

I offer my listening, my obsession with my listening, the god I forget, every minute, to speak with. To the darkness, to the meadow, to oblivion, I offer. & who will come back

from the meadow? Who will open the door of the house & stomp the blood from the treads of his boots? Who waits for him, unable to speak? After the shot tears the air in half, everything

goes quiet. The stars shake. The petals, bats, & lemons. Everything shakes & forgets about god. The answer is it is me waiting for myself, it is me in the meadow.

I kill, die, watch, return, weep, record, & show it to no one— day after day, year after year. Don’t talk to me about willpower.

Jeremy Radin is a writer, actor, teacher, and extremely amateur gardener. His poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Ploughshares, The Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, The Journal, and elsewhere. He is the author of two collections of poetry: Slow Dance with Sasquatch (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012) and Dear Sal (Not A Cult, 2017/2021). He was born and lives in Los Angeles. Follow him @germyradin