On the way to the Collection O Al Otro Lado Del Rio Hotel I think about the screaming maw of ambition and how nothing is ever enough!
BY LOTTE MITCHELL REFORD.
There is a volcano cut from the dark and pushed against the sunset. There is the pink juice of the fading sun caught in its crook like wine spit like bloody gums spit like cinnamon chiclets spit like spit. There is smoke rising from its peak still as an eye on the road or the eye of a needle, maybe. Still as a prey animal pretending not to exist. I imagine wanting nothing more than the fall and the thrust of the earth and the wash of the sky. Nothing more than the spit pooling around my tongue the spit pooling under my tongue. I wish happiness was enough. I wonder if light can be wasted, or if light is only ever lost. There is another mountain then another and with the light like this with the light getting lost or leaving or going elsewhere for the night they look like they are all flat all paper and they are all lined up just right in varying shades of gray and if I wanted to it looks like I could slip myself between them and disappear could slip down inside and get lost.
Lotte Mitchell Reford is usually a poet, but currently working on nonfiction about sickness, language learning, loneliness, and starving medieval saints. Lotte holds an MFA from Virginia Tech and they currently live in Mexico City. Their writing has been published in, amongst other places, Copper Nickel, Spam, Poetry Bus, and Hobart Pulp. Their first pamphlet was published in 2021 by Broken Sleep Books. Lotte won CRAFT’s 2023 nonfiction prize and was nominated for a Pushcart for the same. You can find them on Instagram @oitsyou and on X (Twitter) @LReford.