How To Act in an Emergency
When you can find nowhere to run to,
find your lungs.
Find your tongue, thrashing,
jutting like a steeple through your lips,
and collapse it.
Glass is glass,
a window is a window,
and anything but stillness
will only swallow you,
will coil hungrily up the tendon towers.
Think fast.
Air is running out of space,
of body to curl into.
If you listen close,
each flame is a whispering.
Each lung is a doorway that parts
for you. Each lung is a room
with a glass window.
How To Be Ready For Anything
In your body you are never
stilled, never silent.
You are stirred and swallowed,
stuck
outside the moment,
stuck in motion.
In your body you are seized
with the perpetual.
The mountains hum.
The sky turns red
and prays for curtains.
Something under the water
is humming,
a voice or a shriek, a beetle
with legs reaching backward,
upward.
How To Pray
Please, lord, do not let me
grow happy. Do not let my heart beat
slow.
Overflood my soul with wind
and hair. Make the sky thunder
like chuckling. Stretch me
out on bicycle chains. Kill me
the way white bread slowly kills us.
The way they tell us fluoride
blooms death into our lungs.
The way this moment passes,
not a gentle sliding
into the next, but as quick and violent
as a crashing bone.
How to Be A 15 Year Old Poet
Anyway, might as well use it
to your advantage. Steal a house
out of a hat. Pull colors from their teeth,
wake neon in the flesh, make colors fizz and flesh tremble with neon.
Carve them with wit and kill air. Bring your head out of the basket
when they least expect it.
Daniel Blokh is a 15-year-old American writer of Russian-Jewish descent, living in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of the memoir In Migration (BAM! Publishing 2016), the micro- chapbook The Wading Room (Origami Poems Project 2016), and the chapbook Grimmening (forthcoming from Diode Editions). His work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing awards and the Foyle Young Poet awards, and has appeared in DIALOGIST, Gigantic Sequins, Forage Poetry, Avis Magazine, Thin Air Magazine, Cicada Magazine, and more. He works as an editor at Parallel Ink and a reader at the Adroit Journal. He should probably go play outside with his friends, but he's busy worrying about the results of his writing submissions.