Ode to Love Handles
when your teeth resemble mangled accordion keys, tendril curls jangled & jumbled
around the top of your skull, the bingo-wing Jello jiggling in your arms when you
approach your torso and try to curve your palms slowly across your hips, shaking
the atlas of your rump, like an earthquake without the aftermath following
holding your paunchy flab like the child you never had but always wanted
embracing the glow of your cellulite, the teddy bear warmth best incubated around
the contours of beer-bellied corpulence, the soft dad-bod touch that wraps around you
like a weighted blanket, except it’s the surface of your own skin: a caress in the form
of self-love when that is so hard to find
To the Statue of Jesus Laying on a Park Bench Between Delaware Avenue & Church Street in Downtown Buffalo
An honest depiction next to the bus stop in a city
where the sky is always smeared with grey. Beside
the concourse of a nearby cathedral that taunts each
patron with its gothic spires, the phallic smugness
staring down at every faithless denizen. The way the
stone carved prophet sleeps with a newspaper quilt,
gravel lips slouched in the vein of a tired deity. The
bronze-plastered domes top siding the courthouse
just a few intersections down, the fork between the
190 South & the 190 North, as cars break city speed
limits as if this Sunday never deserved to be holy in
the first place. Sometimes, I would sit next to the statue,
attempt to ignore the cacophony of traffic horns and
road-raged fuck yous, barricade the rest of my vision
from the gilded awnings of various buildings and set
them to his shuttered clay eyes, confessing to the
sleeping idol the deepest swell of my desires, the
darkest confessionals I could not ever confess even
in this poem. Not for the sake of atonement, just to
have a set of ears listening, even if they’re inanimate.
J.B. Stone is a neurodivergent/autistic slam poet, writer, and reviewer residing in Buffalo, NY. He is the author of A Place Between Expired Dreams And Renewed Nightmares (Ghost City Press 2018) and INHUMAN ELEGIES (Ghost City Press 2020). He is the Editor-In-Chief/Reviews Editor at Variety Pack. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Peach Mag, [PANK], Frontier Poetry, MoonPark Review, Gravel, and elsewhere.