Emily Izsak :: Three poems from Never Have I Ever

Had Sex With More Than One Person at a Time

Three’s a crowd of dissimilar               fussy diversions   busy   within the story

Four    marbles the allergies

                               We can’t have plain honey   it doesn’t sit
          if it isn’t
                bundled

 with bandwagons   full to the whim

Enough means surplus   solves a trilogy

 and extra oars    don’t muck

our gut’s   geometry

Had Sex With More Than One Person

Just a couple of hopeless

      hermitic Semitics        consummately  pleased

                                         to worship a less repulsive equilibrium

No offense

          but   tremors have never fed upon

                               petals or meat      too capricious

                                                         to wonder

          how the Finnish finish

What’s restrictive

to those    who see the forest for the tease?

                                                   Plenty of hackneyed mackerel

                                                              plead to be   slingshot   into monogamy

Been Pregnant 

Or felt a radio     dribble

down modest morphology

 dense as anything

Were the pills adverse to similes?
          Swallowed out of context     Loved for mechanistic gestures

Highfalutin leaflets on their nutrient-dense trajectories
while I wisecrack for two

Vomit is true
and tethered with reckless expansion
to unexpected gestalt

Emily Izsak is the author of Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem (Signature Editions, 2017), Twenty Five (above/ground press, 2018) and Stickup (shuffaloff/Eternal Network, 2015). Her work has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, The Puritan, House Organ, Cough, CV2, The Doris, and The Hart House Review. In 2014 she was selected as PEN Canada’s New Voices Award nominee. Emily currently writes clickbait so she can afford rent in Toronto. She also married a doctor, so that helps.