Grant Chemidlin

Grant Chemidlin is a queer poet and currently, an MFA candidate at Antioch University-Los Angeles. He is the author of the chapbook New in Town (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and his full-length collection, What We Lost in the Swamp, will be published by Central Avenue Publishing in 2023. He has been a finalist for the Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award and the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Recent work has been featured or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, Quarterly West, and River Heron Review, among others.

When I Time-Traveled Back to My Youth

things looked different.
I was a series ofstatues.
Pink flesh, blue slacks, painted. 
Eyes, a bright brown buthard as marble. 
I was unmoving, wordless:
back of the classroom, eyes unblinking,
standing at the bottom of the poollooking up at the surface, 
by the cake, family laughing, mother & siblingsflitting around the kitchen. 
My stone lips, trapped breath,the candles kept their orange heads. 
How did no one notice?
Tiny cracks if you looked closely. 

Realizing the Recorded Voice of the Subway Announcements is

somebody’s mother. Bodiless angel, voice chiseledinto time’s stone wall. What happens when she’s gone:Grown son paces the hot platform in his suit, red with regret. Daughter, now a mother herself, rides the A-line all day, swaddled in the metal womb. Young grandson stares up at the speaker perched high in the corner like a black moon, lunar eclipse. He doesn’t understand where her hands went, her face, why she will not say his name.

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