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Ansley Clark

we believed ourselves / to be lit up / like cakes but / we were not cakes


Bravo

We were so loud
so pleased with
the parties we threw
for ourselves
with much applause
we made ourselves cry
over the magnitude
of our own beauty
meanwhile the ocean
rode us like teeth
no one noticed
grey lights played
in the pool out back
in the hurricane
the abandoned
tropical house tightened
small animals lived there
we believed
our bodies to be
red ferries summoning
the nightlife
but we were not the ferries
we believed ourselves
to be lit up
like cakes but
we were not cakes we were
the heaving waters
a wall of shit
and burning.


Ansley Clark is from the Pacific Northwest. She is a teacher, editor, and MFA student at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Her work has appeared in Sixth Finch, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, interrupture, DREGINALD, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Geography (dancing girl press 2015).