Mag Gabbert - Winner of the Action, Spectacle Poetry Contest
Winter 2022 Edition / Poetry
Considering Whether to Use ‘Cum’ or ‘Come’ in a Sext
Mag Gabbert
The taste of outer space is sweet and metallic.
Think about the planets, hovering like bees around honey.
Think about the average human life and its six years of dreams.
cum here baby [a beginning]; come here baby [although you can’t be born again].
Scattered raindrops across a window—and just beyond those, a galaxy.
A cool night. Silk slipped over the head. The static that’s left.
Does it have any substance?
come inside [before another door opens]; cum inside [the universe only expands].
No one knows for sure whether this moon came from fragments of its own
broken earth first, or was pulled into orbit.
Think about that.
if u were freezing & u had 2 pick, wud u rather b near fire or b on it?
come on [pls don’t change the subject]; cum on [I only want what I can’t have].
Not the sparkler, but the second afterward, silent and unlit. Not the gun, but
the air charged with gunpowder.
Mag Gabbert is the author of the forthcoming collection SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS (Mad Creek Books, 2023), which won the Charles B. Wheeler Prize in Poetry from The Ohio State University and The Journal, and the chapbook Minml Poems from Cooper Dillon Books (2020). She’s the recipient of a 2021 92Y Discovery Award as well as fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Idyllwild Arts, and Poetry at Round Top. Her work can be found in The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, Copper Nickel, Guernica, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Mag has an MFA from UC Riverside and a PhD from Texas Tech. She lives in Dallas, Texas and teaches at Southern Methodist University.