Sunny Rosen (she/her) is your friendly neighborhood bisexual anticapitalist and a graduating LSU MFA student. Originally from Newark, Delaware, she lived in New Zealand and Florida before landing in Baton Rouge. Her work has been published by or is forthcoming in The Chicago Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Caesura, among other outlets. She has received a Best of the Net nomination, an honorable mention from the AWP Intro Journals Project, a David Madden MFA Award for Fiction, and an Elda Wollaeger Gregory Poetry Award. Sunny also works as a copywriter and publicity coordinator for LSU Press and The Southern Review. Find her here.
for tauruses
you bull bastards
one of you cheated on my mother
another of you on me
betrayed me for eleven full months
all twisted tendons and trips to the free clinic
and teeth marks and used useless condoms
often wrong but never in doubt
so stubborn but not stubborn enough
to stand behind a value or a word.
you could’ve been ferdinand the bull
the best and kindest of the calves
peaceful in that sweet-smelling flower field
under clouds that catch and pillow the light
butterfly resting on your pink-ridged nose
bullheaded sweet under the cork tree
headstrong gentle before the matador’s sword and the red flag
choosing instead poppies and long grass.
instead, you buck, bull, bronco
throw riders to the ground
and grind them down
stomp livestock dirt and sand into their skull wounds
sweat and crowd-screams mixing
with the panicked fog of your nostril breath.
instead, you minotaur, you guard your maze
chewing whole human bones with your flat cow teeth
all horns and arms and furious eyebrows
biting yourself, drawing blood
smelling the must of the stone walls
of the labyrinth you’ve built.
i do my own chart
and my moon is in taurus
cruel bovine beast inside me
cow bull moon rising over
my poppies and my long grass
my gore-red sunset field.
SPELL TO GET THE CEREAL AND MILK OUT OF OUR HAIR
Pink baby seashell ear pressed to the door hears
ocean father, moon mother, their tidal waves, boiling, roiling.
Don’t listen, she whispers to her little
sister, born in summer, when the air smelled
like salt, sweat, sunscreen, citronella, peach Gerber fruit snacks.
In the bedroom with stars on the ceiling
they lock fingers and press together the
palms of their small smooth feet and they glow and hum with no tune.
Unsteady, like mermaids learning to walk,
they hold hands, push open the door, dive deep into
the living room, the carpeted sea, little teeth unsocketed, offerings.
Their magic isn’t strong enough to stop
their father from hurling the cereal bowl
at their mother or to stop the skim milk from drenching their skin.
It’s not strong enough to make the bathtub fill
faster or to stop them from shivering
blue with their mother while they wait for the water to rise.
But their magic pulls all the pieces of
Frosted Flakes from their fine hair and makes it
so they smell like L’Oreal Kids instead of sugar and milk
when they wade their way to school the next day.
DIED UNEXPECTEDLY
On the flight home swallowing
apple juice and Biscoff cookies
I imagine free falling
from where I sit at 28,000 feet
the carpeted metal lurching, giving out
the stomach-drop of it
limbs flailing
skin freezing
wind screaming
knife-cold in ears
their drums exploding
lungs shriveled gasping
eyes bursting wet like grapes
cloud wisps flying through fingers
ocean rising up
water-pummeling fist of frothing blue
swallowing my body whole toes first
bulleting a mile down into the deep
and I wonder if my old friend would be there
sitting on the sea bottom or
perched on a thick cloud
watching me go down
No one will tell me how he died
I’m not on the list of important enough people
But I remember when we went swimming in the state park after dark
his husband and my ex-husband letting us borrow their shoes
and the breathtaking cold of the creek on our wine-soaked skin
and us lined up next to the cop car after the flashlights found us
and his dark eyes meeting mine as we produced our licenses
and how, after, he helped me wring the ice water out of my hair
and gave me his second-to-last cigarette
BRING ME A SWARM OF BEES
Settle your six legs on my arms and fingers. And if I fly to the woods, fly wild with me, wings buzzing thousands in my ears.
If someone chases me, looking to finish what he started fifteen years ago, go as emissaries back to frighten him away—but don’t sting, don’t die for me the death of intestines and muscles and glands ripped out with stinger.
If disease finds me, pass your nectar from mouth to mouth to mouth until it’s honey, then swarm my mouth and spit some to me. Soothe my aching throat. And my nausea and my split ends. Drip wax through your glands to make me candles and butter so I’m never chapped or cracked or in the dark.
Crawl over my face, make me bee-crusted, so bee teardrops roll down my cheeks and bee earrings dangle from my ears. Crawl down my body so I’m lifted and separated as you wriggle rococo and golden over my breasts and into the hollow of my belly button and around the beauty marks on my feet. Squirt venom onto my lips until I’m kissable, until I become a woman who is kissed instead of groped.
Cling to me like ants to sugar. Be as mindful of my welfare as is each woman of suffering and salt water. Be my lemon sky. Wordless as the ocean, but like it, still, you speak.