classifieds and other poems by Chloe DeFilippis

you took my shredded skin / wove it into baskets / sold them for $$$
couldn’t protest cuz my voice’s been ground into fine white powder
you pack into little baggies / you sell that too / you entrepreneur you

---

~away message~

do u 4get my ghost
buzz-buzz-buzzin
against ur window
my body’s kissin’ sky now
but there was that time
i fit into ur bellybutton
& u pressed me into a flower
mouth open wiiiiiiiiiiddddde
molars silent screaming
ahhhhhhhhhh ha ha ha

---

ant colony

on the ground floor in blue light
on the ground meat in plastic wrap
on the grrrrrr ow ow OW

brain matter like paint splatter
wear it on a denim jacket like
oh, it’s vintage, thrifted
oh i knoooooo ow OW

turned out was:

all dem boiiz got REAL small
climbed the stairs of my throat,
sat smokin blunts, drinkin 40’s
(like what it is this the 90’s)
left everything they brought too
now i’m so full of litter, but

~it’s cool~

i’m cool

i swear

by my mother by my father
peel myself back and there
they thrive like an ant colony
crawling just beneath the surface
press the tender parts and out they come
from the inside—i, i, i

second………… thought
……………..but
i ….lie…… i lie ……..i lie
better than………….. better than
you do you do you do you do

---

recipe

in sleep, he buttered me green
hands shaped elastic
a quick trick for stiff drawers

opened, closed, i was full
of spoons he did not need
and shoved back into me

could never find what he wanted, i guess
his mother never taught him to pray:
Dear Saint Anthony, please come around,
something is lost and cannot be found.

---

call yourself

the devil wears your face on his top hat
the gypsy sees fates on birch trees
collects your teeth like tears
in the palm of baby-skin hands

call yourself a man
incapable
of holding on forever

one argues with oneself in dreams
swipes through possibilities
like tinder like grindr like penny prints

i made my body a bubbling recess of my family’s
my ancestors are the calluses on my two big toes that i scrub
all that immigrant pain flakes away to return with time
black voids like unexplored ocean that bleed through your eyes

the crucifix was my childhood fascination
big, medium, small in St. Michael’s church
i preferred the one as tall as me:
his body like it had been yanked from the earth, cross and all

i’d touch his feet when no one was near, smooth and cold,
covered in blood, he was dripping but still so clean
yet his eyes screamed
through mine

---

About the author:

Chloe DeFilippis is an Italian-Polish-American Scorpio from Bayonne, New Jersey. Her poetry and flash nonfiction have appeared in the journal Voices in Italian Americana as well as in the e-anthology Olive Grrrls: Italian North American Women & The Search For Identity. She holds a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from New Jersey City University. Currently, Chloe works as a sales assistant at a publishing company in New York City. She will be reading at the Calandra Institute on March 22, 2017.