Congratulations to past contributor Christopher Citro on his recent poetry collection If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun, which was published by Elixir Press in April. The collection is Christopher’s second poetry book.
The title poem was originally published in Gulf Coast Literary Journal in 2018:
If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun I’d like to invite you to the party but I don’t know your name, have your address, or know you well enough to really want you around my cat. I feel a kinship with all people and then I share a beach with them and want to yell use your inside voice. We’re outside but that doesn’t mean we’ll not dissolve if raised to the light. Some days the sea wants to chew us into shattered two-by-fours. Some days she’s a kitten pasting soft hairs around our ankles. I know—I know this for a fact—there are moist pasta salads being prepared and eaten all around me—in those bushes for instance—and I’m not getting any. I tried to start my life out right and still lost track of where I was going. Example, I picked my college because my girlfriend went there. She slept with my best friend. I went there anyway. That determined the course of the rest of my life. I wiped the table down with bleach before sitting and now my forearm smells. It’s going to be okay though. I’m going to need this bleach-arm for some purpose. To identify some wanderers in the sky it’s helpful to determine the color. At a distance everything for me goes gray. A mountain range in a black-and-white film. We’ve been walking, my horse and I, for days. For water we think about rivers and lick our own ideas.
Check out this video to hear Christopher read two poems in the collection, “It’s Something People in Love Do” and “Our Beautiful Life When It’s Filled With Shrieks.”
The collection is the winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award and is available from Small Press Distribution. Find more from Christopher on his website, Instagram, and Twitter.