Deviated Septum | Overused Viewmaster

Deviated Septum

You said you wanted to try organized religion and I said okay, let’s make one. I said I
have heard about the language of the flowers—they say it’s quite nice. You said you
have a deviated septum and could not bear to live a lie. I said well, I have seasonal
allergies, so we might as well try. You said fuck it and rolled your eyes. I said you
won’t like where you’ll go when you die. You said is that so, with a wave of the brow.
No! I cried and the bluebells fell, and the cornflower wilted, but the white violets
swelled. You asked what would happen when the chrysanthemums bloom. I said
don’t know much about worship, but I imagine we’re doomed.

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Overused Viewmaster

Celluloid film strip projected
on a piece of broken contacts lens
stuck on the back of my eye:
here is the fake flesh refusing to die.
Sharp jagged plastics clinging
and scratching, floating over my
retinas and casting splotchy
snapshots on the ceiling.
Viewmaster reels slide over the sclera:
flick flick flick flick flick.

You will be interested to stop on this skyline
seen from the top of a parking garage
where I lit lite cigarettes, got hungry and
ate the yogurt-swirl sky with a spoon while
reciting shitty poetry by light of the moon.
It was all very rosy romantic until
I got home and screamed off the
balcony until my lungs vomited out
my throat and plopped thirteen stories
onto my landlord’s car— new surcharge.

Another film strip and I’m licking the
snow off my lips at the gas station
listening to “Semi-Charmed Life”.
It might have looked like a 2010’s indie
movie, but with the micro bangs I was
a poorman’s Emma Watson and
the Wawa lighting was tungsten,
not blue. Either way, the flakes
tasted like nothing and I probably looked
like a massive prick to everyone around.

This one has cigarette burns
twisted straight through. I see
scratchy blankets and adult cartoons.
Reaching, stuttering, landing face-
down in your room, but my brain is
wreck, Far Far Away with the end
credits of Shrek. I’m sorry I’m leaning
at your doorway. I feel like a tree—
so help me get home, please? And now
my roommate’s my babysitter. Great.

Here Bella sits in the same chair
for a year as all the seasons change
around her— utterly pathetic and hilarious.
Letting her breakfast go expired in
the mini fridge, eyes sprouting like
weeds from the ceiling, running
on the treadmill as if she can exorcise
her organs. We take the shapes of
once familiar shadows, faded into the light.
Won’t someone put a green filter over my life?

The last time I felt a contact lens stuck
I had to drive ten miles to the urgent
care and they peeled twenty years of
film from the inside of my eyelids.
You’d think I’d give them up for
good, and I swear one of these days,
I’m going to gouge out my eye
trying to peel the little guys out, but
I guess then I’ll finally have an excuse
to toss out this overused Viewmaster.

Chloë Williams (she/her) is a writer, filmmaker, and Professional Writing Master’s student at Towson University. She has been published in the Our Minds, Our Future poetry anthology, Grub Street Literary Magazine, isotrope: Literary Journal, and Sunday Mornings at the River’s “Depression Is What Really Killed the Dinosaurs,” which is named after one of her poems. Find her on Instagram at @poemsfromanotherplanet.