Suzanne Richardson
Summer 2024 | Poetry
A MATRILINEAL HISTORY OF HUFFING
1991
On my bedroom closet floor, feet squirm
in wool tights. Stroking my horse stuffed
animal’s button eyeball with my big toe.
Phalanges curling and uncurling to the rhythm
of my breath.
Uncapping/gasping the thick
markers clean/wise-wide/shots of white/
blank up the mind/vacuum light/thought
windows lock/tighten/tourmaline/October/
gashes in the brain/
Careful and private,
once or twice coloring my left nostril black.
Placing the markers back in my mother’s
bedside drawer she kept some jewelry
safety pins Vaseline a box of my aunt’s teeth.
The twisted mighty things.
The crooked dentist
in town pulled them all when she was only sixteen.
Sometimes I took the teeth with me into the closet.
Because who really wants to be alone when you’re
just one big nose that wants to sniff the world up
inside you.
2007
Bucharest at night down the cobblestone
streets we see long shadows stroke
back and forth along the walls like
monster’s teeth opening and closing.
It’s gangs of wild dogs and teenagers.
We’ve been warned. They both run in
packs. The teens run in leather coats
holding socks over their mouth and noses.
Like rings of saturn, silver spray paint
circling their faces. Devotion to gulping.
How swallowing can paint your whole face.
I know it well. We passed one girl coming up
for air. Her mouth chrome blazed in a trail
of don’t give two fucks. Her eyes growled at me.
2017
That psycho dentist they all call “Carbocaine” shows up to the two-day party with a tank of nitrous and furry pink cowboy hat. He spanks the tank like a demented sex clown while filling balloons. He can’t shut up about parties in Ibiza. You can hear the latex snapping on the dance floor over the music. Ever see people dancing while kissing balloons? One guy leans in to tell my boyfriend he wishes he had a girl like me. I am sucking down big hits and laughing hysterically against the wall. Carefully watching the lights go on and off inside me with each pull. A girl like me? A twinkle twinkle little star girl? I’m not really here girl? A girl who slurps gas like white wine? A girl who lets her lungs pill? Everything is funny. Especially that.
1963
Long before I was born, my aunts
were a pair of farmgirl psychonauts.
Found in a field
passed out like dead piglets
draped on the back of the tractor,
one’s nose still in the gas tank.
They had uncapped, straddled,
taking turns giggling and leaning
in until almost stone-souled. Close
to gone, but not quite. Like me,
they cranked out, sailed inhalant
seas, came back to tell the story.
Suzanne Richardson earned her M.F.A. in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the University of New Mexico. She currently lives in Binghamton, New York where she's a Ph.D. student in creative writing at SUNY Binghamton. She is working on a memoir, Throw it Up, and a full poetry collection, The Want Monster which was named a 2024 finalist for the Saturnalia Book Awards.. She is the current nonfiction editor for Harpur Palate. Her nonfiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, New Haven Review, Rejection Lit, and No Contact Magazine. Her poetry has appeared in Bomb Magazine, Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, and DIALOGIST. Her fiction has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Front Porch, and High Desert Journal. More about Suzanne and her writing can be found here:https://www-suzannerichardsonwrites.tumblr.com/