2  by tommy "Teebs" pico

Image by Aarati Akkapeddi

from Nature Poem

It took tons

for me to come to this relationship

with even a thin crust mantle of optimism.

You say to yrself, into the mirror, the humidifier misting behind you— 

Okay, first a selfie— 

You say, I’m going to do this. We’re doing this. Slipping into love like sleep.

What is it inside nature

that turns a color into danger,

a season into a reminder of sitting across each other across a tinny table, copperish, 
unseasonably hot in our tall bodies no shade

while I waited

for the words I knew were coming.

Evolution is not very Victoria Beckham

is a thing I felt like saying

to myself on the subway ride home. And, when will my neck finally be long enough to 
reach the leaves
in the canopy?

from Nature Poem

The stars are dying

like always, and far away, like what you see looking up is a death knell from light, 
right? Light

years. But also close, like the sea stars on the Pacific coast. Their little arms lesion 
and knot and pull away

The insides spill into the ocean. Massive deaths. When I try to sleep I think about 
orange cliffs, bare of orange stars. Knotted, glut. Waves are clear. Anemones n shit. 
Sand crabs n shit. Fleas. There are seagulls overhead. Business as normal. I swore to 
myself I would never write a nature poem.

The sand is fine. They say it’s not Fukushima. I feel fine, in the sense that I feel very 
thin. I been doin Tracy Anderson DVDs and keeping my arms fit and strong. She says 
reach, like you are being pulled apart

I can’t not spill, sometimes it sometimes. What you see is what you glut. There are 
sometimes insides.

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TOMMY “TEEBS" PICO was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary poetry fellow, and has poems in BOMB, Guernica, and [PANK]. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he lives in Brooklyn and co-curates the reading series POETS WITH ATTITUDE with Morgan Parker. @heyteebs