Haley Clapp is a Midwest-based heart-writer getting her MA in Critical Methodologies at King’s College London. Her work has appeared in Severine Literary Journal, Rising Phoenix Review, and Vagabond City Literary Journal. She tweets & instagrams at @_haleybopp.
1 prose poem
by Haley Clapp
i did psychedelics for the first time this year
This life cycles just like all other lives cycle, and they’re all gears that won’t match up more than once. Sometimes I see the immanences that collide together to make the limbs that all things are made out of—literal limbs, of course, arms and legs and things but antenna too, the shit aliens are made out of, the shit thoughts are made out of and the microscopic molecules that suck past housefly jaws. All we are is adhering limbs of matter that move through other matter like we’re coherent rag dolls or better, like we are all (by our)selves. I see time in slices too—each slice of time (if time existed in its most originary component) raising in ecstasis to toe tangent to reality to reach the top point of a ferris wheel, the place where all possibilities of all universes converge onto this second by relation to its past and future seconds, calculus, but each second not as a derivative or a speed but as that one site through all time where all universes will converge in my perspective to make this moment, only perceivable through time’s arbitrary stencil. Then its over, god it’s already over, only to cycle down with the knowledge that you were just that last timeslice at the top, that you were the second-to-last-timeslice at the top, that third-to-last-timeslice at the top until all the timeslices turn into frames-per-second that I read as a past, my past, which I continue to shuckle on a projector in the dark while continuing to decipher with raised eyebrows the timeslices Time keeps shoving in my hands like those cards in Vegas they slap on their thighs before double fingering in your face. I had axes but shifting from gear arm to gear arm left those far away, hidden in the carlights and cornfields and the back alley of a divebar in february and that feeling of alienation I had after parties that I still have but now it’s much more desperate, much more like blind gravity collapsing as I cling to one black wool side then this bed which I won’t see again after this month cause the merry go round always stops and your mom takes you away by the hand until next time, only next time you’re three years older and they got rid of the horses that went up and down and left the stationary ones that wrench their gums up in horsey screams that you can hear a lot more when you’re older, that you notice cause their mouths don’t move like mirages but instead sit stony, like plastic and ceramic, which they are, when three years ago they were Life Itself, when you couldn’t believe such a weightless feeling was only a quarter and momma was happy to pay it, when momma was alive and not a yellowing face in a hospital pillow, before I had to be alone again, before I made margarita after margarita and massacred the mix in my bullet blender until I ran out of ice and passed out on the couch alone.