Featured Poet, Larry Bourland Poetry, Durango Colorado

L. K. Poet Durango Colorado

Name: L.K.

Location: CO based

Bio: L.K is a queer artist and poet based in Colorado. Much of their works stems from their experiences with queerness, mental illness, and their experiences in life as whole. They enjoy collecting typewriters, bones, and dragons. Outside of writing poetry, they enjoy drawing, playing Dungeons and Dragons, reading, and Renaissance Faires. You can find more of their poetry on Instagram at ‘teethandtealeaves’.

“You Will Never Leave This Place’

L.K. (teethandtealeaves)

The smell of the house you grew up in will always linger,

though you will forget where it came from when it passes

you in the street.

The way the sunlight filtered through the trees you’d play

in will always leave dappled patterns on your ever aging skin,

places where you remain young and warm and in bliss of

something simpler.

There will always be a rock in your shoe, and a penny in the

other, and you will always pour milk with the same clumsy

hands of your youth.

You will always put your shoes on the wrong feet, you will

always get lost in your sweater.

Your friends will have children that look like the kids you

biked down the hill with, the kids you did history projects

with, the kids you fought in the schoolyard.

There will always be a squeaking chain on the playground

swing, you will always smell wet mulch and linger just a

little longer.

You can sit on the swing if you’d like, there’s nobody telling

you to come home with the streetlights.

You will always remain in your childhood home,

The weight of the couch will always leave indentations in

the carpet no matter how many times it is replaced,

The walls will always remember the arguments and the

crayons and the height chart no matter how many times

they are painted over.

You will always sleep in your childhood bedroom, no matter

how many miles you are from it, or how many years.

Some version of you will always climb into your parents bed

after a nightmare, some version of your father is still alive

smoking on the porch.

Some version of your mother is still making cinnamon rolls

from scratch and some version of your sister, or your brother,

is still watching over the edge of the kitchen table and swiping

patterns into the floured surface.

You will always have drawings on the fridge, there will always

be a version of you that believes in magic, there will always

be a plastic halloween mask in the basement and there will

always be a baseball game on the radio.

The tv will always be black and white, the teen titans theme

will always fill your mornings, the cereal will always have too

much sugar or not enough.

You will always be stuck on the same level of super mario,

and you’ll always have to blow the super nintendo cartridge

at least once to get it working.

Try as you might, you will never leave this place, some part

of you will always linger, and you will never forget the smell

of the house you grew up in.

“some kind of universal love poem”

L.K. (teethandtealeaves)

I’m not good at it,

writing love poems.

The platonic kind,

the romantic kind,

I can’t figure it out.

Don’t get me wrong,

I’ve written a few.

Fuzzy, cloudy things

these days they devolve into thoughts about how

meat loves meat and I can’t possibly be worthy of much.

Part of me started to worry I don’t know what love is,

certainly my life had been lacking in it.

How do you know something that hardly ever graced your doorstep, something that often came hand in hand

with claws?

i thought maybe I wasn’t worth it,

so I stuck to writing what I know.

And I wasn’t sure if I knew what love was,

at least,

not how it looked in the context of myself and some kind of inherent worthiness of it.

But a friend makes me a playlist full of weird rock music,

the kind that sounds like chewing on ice

and smells a little like grease and nails

and tastes like metal.

Another brings a Magic deck in green sleeves,

With characters I know,

Hobbits and a ring and tells me “Sam and Frodo are both your commanders” and I sort of get the hang of it, and

two weeks later

she makes the trip both ways across town to bring me thai food.

One lover cuts my hair on the back porch, and sweeps it under

So nobody can use it for anything bad.

And washes the bleach out of my hair every time I feel the need to start over in my body.

This is a frequent feeling.

So our love smells like vaseline and box dye and Dr. Bronners Lavender Soap.

One lover picks me up in the kitchen, and rocks me back and forth,

all I have to do is put my hands up,

they hold me when my body is too heavy to go anywhere but the floor.

They make sure I eat something,

And turn the tv on when I’m having a bad day, to drown out the thoughts I can’t control.

and our love feels like a weighted blanket, and a sunny spot on the couch.

All this to say,

maybe I do know how to write a love poem.

maybe I just don’t know how to write them down.

so I fill up blue, sticker covered water bottles, and make tea, and run baths when I can convince you to stop

moving.

And leave aside a serving or two of plain noodles, and braid a million little elvish braids into your hair, and pour

you coffee most mornings as a thank you when we’re both too tired for this.

and invite people over for dinner, and out for drinks, and poetry

and tune into a radio show on sundays and read house of leaves, even though I have to turn half the book 90

degrees.

because I can’t write a love poem,

I don’t know how to do that.

but I know that I call you my sun and my stars, and that I want to build our house from the dirt up if it means I

get to fill up water bottles and set aside noodles forever.

and I know how to light a shared smoke, and I know that sometimes your friends can feel like home.

“There’s a Wasp Nest in the Shower.”

L.K. (teethandtealeaves)

Between the screen and the glass is a papery nest for a creature that cares little where it places it’s anger,

I carry a can of Raid into the shower with me,

I’ll rinse the walls when I’m done and my shampoo will mask the smell of my crime.

I’ve played god with a can of chemicals,

punishing a creature for nothing more than the crime of being alive and crawling over the yellow-aged plastic

lining of a shower that has seen many more summers than I have, and many more wasps.

This week I will repeat this process three more times,

And I will trap a spider under my boot and listen to the crunch of an abdomen much more delicate than I am.

I will eye the roaches in the stovetop with disgust, we’ve been fighting our battle for years now.

I will get stung by three more yellow-jackets before the summer is done.

I will work in a warehouse in my twenties, and capture every spider gingerly in a cup, and scoop pillbugs into my

palms, and catch every wasp that happens to fly in.

I place them on the concrete,

In the grass,

By a tree.

I halt all production to make sure they make it back outside safe.

Who am I to decide what lives or dies?

I don’t kill spiders anymore.

And there’s a paper wasp nest under my rib cage, and the smell of Raid in my nose, but I have not killed

anything for the crime of being alive in a long time.