Current
Issue
Volume 12.1
Grace Rebekah Wiersma
—
He’s Never Read 1984
He smells like bubblegum and gunpowder or lilac
Yankee Candles.
He’s pungent and lovesick—he’s so
burnt out from his job as a salesman. He’ll
sell me tickets and packets of peanuts
under red and white roofs. He’ll nosebleed
on my floral blouse
He tries to fix my old, leaky sink and
loses himself down the drain.
He irons his pants and singes the hem before
bouncing off to work.
I give him plastic trophies and pink kisses for
tasting like gummy bears. He looks
like a spill on the Seven Eleven pavement
and greasy. He is iridescent,
bumpy, refracting everything around him. I long
to bite his white collar,
my canines imprinted in cotton.
His sleeves catch fire
on the stove— it smells like popcorn,
rose, and petrol. I dream of him in linen walking
into the sunset, and tripping.
Grace Rebekah Wiersma is a Missouri-born poet in her early twenties. Her most recent manuscript The Gas Station Hymnal is a religious romp along Midwestern highways which explores themes of queer girlhood, Missouri-Wisconsin Americana, surrealist visions of God, and of course, the beautiful grime of gas stations. Grace graduated from Lawrence University in 2025 with a bachelor's degree in creative writing and now lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is a winner of the Hicks Prize in Poetry and a Phi Beta Kappa scholar. When she isn’t writing about riverbugs and fast food restaurants, Grace teaches ballroom dance and collects clown art.
