Sadie Dupuis

Fake Blood on a Fake Fur Coat

On a dark ride with my devious nature
What can I manifest, filling hole after hole
Blue flame for power
Black flame for tender
Days of uncleanliness patterned like a remedy
One gnat for the drinking glass
Dried onion on the stairs
It’s the second month of the year and the second hour after midnight
Make your home uncomfortable if you really want to leave
But I really really want to wait it out under the puffy endlessness
Hands in the holes in the satin pockets
Confined in the deep silk of uncharacteristic weather
Which never again changes
Only my ego, and it’s splattered

Oh My God Shoes

Wonder what it’s like not to hear the bomb
Five left before the infrastructure collapse
My cradled egg experiment

Don’t wear that sweet scent just to placate me
Spent red rose overcooking on the dashboard
Then dusting in the vase of my work boots

I’ll square that suck up in the eyes
shimmering off the shine
of my other work shoes

Who are you? That’s my favorite question
When it’s said in awe
When I’ve escaped or when I’m caught

Projecting my essence to an empty ballroom
Six static steps to believing in others
Tripping the lights in a closed down arcade

So trained and capable I broke down in a rash
Boiling down others, aspiring to their innards
with double digits blades in my back

The way I’m appealing is appearing upside down
An hourglass in reverse, sandcastling
If you want a job done you must bring you your flowers

Steal My Sunshine

Day one cancer season
sitting on the floor of a
blasting shower. Day two

cancer season fuck you
bring it. Picturing sunflowers
brains blanketing the coffins,

this was a summer regular
another relic to the truck-chasing
dirty footed youth of greens toned

(dream, the kind after you’ve fallen
back asleep tense and vivid
impossibly vast for the minutes).

Writing your name in honey
on a slip of paper and hiding
that in a drawer for underwear

how much grief is normal?
What’s normal is losing
so many hours to interstitial nightmares

waking, wanting
to commemorate forever
(falling off the balance beam)

into new methods of grieving
what’s still here. I grieve,
I spend harrowing timelosses chewing

away the sides of my fingers imagining
a world without. Deprivation
bereavement bereft how much

is normal? My head between breasts
a chemical warmth, the security
of wallowing in an overcoat.

Night gave me ecstasy. This will ruin
our friendship, the wetness of death
through jeans, normal? You can try

to normalize death like sunshine
cats babies birdbaths breasts baggies
of powder. The bed loaned me

to be with someone I really loved.
I was over it while death
informed every swivel, sashay, suck-neck

saber-tongued tears of pride
as you fold into the blue grained darkness.
In the sunflower maze

following your broken trail
smoke in a smog.
With the spell in my pants pocket

delusional by necessity.
I want the month underwater.
Pruning, scaling, horning, eyes marquee

red full of darts wet at throat
the sight of monsters the gesture
of sharing my paw. You can set fire

to the surface of the water, alight every
river, block your passage to the openness
of the (salty) sea, destroy your way

but you aren’t above love.
You always needed love.
You always needed love. You

always needed love you
were always parched.
Ready to be overcome

by love taxing
your bloodstream
your reign

you are ready to be
love to death.

Sadie Dupuis is the Philadelphia-based guitarist, songwriter & singer of rock band Speedy Ortiz, as well as the producer & multi-instrumentalist behind pop project Sad13. Sadie heads the record label Wax Nine, has written cultural criticism for outlets including Spin, Nylon, and Playboy, and holds an MFA in poetry from UMass Amherst, where she also taught writing. Mouthguard, her first book, was published in 2018 (Black Ocean). Find her @sad13.