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You are here: Home / Poetry / Large Scale Failures

Large Scale Failures

Poetry by Julianne Neely

Your failures wouldn’t even

make the weight
class to fight alongside

my failures in

a ring. One

of my failures set itself on fire and jumped from the
Brooklyn Bridge singing a Bible hymn on

the way down. Something about

Jesus saving, but another of
my failures was the air

in Pontius Pilate’s    lungs.
Look any of my

failures in the eye. You’ll melt from

their laser beam glare
then they’ll splash around in

the puddle of yourself.
Even the sky hates

my failures. A failure of mine ripped a
cloud right from it,

put the
vapor in a water

bong and smoked it.

I had a failure stand
on the side of a

road with its
thumb out and a

newborn smile on its face.
A young couple picked it

up and

my failure    gutted them

like a rabbit
before a

hunter cooks it. Keep surveillance
on my failures and you

will catch them licking grimy
poles in subway cars then tonging

innocent bystanders. You    can
see them stroll nude into

a café, scaring patrons. But

if you stick around long
enough, when the moon

comes out casting
ice-skating rink

glints, you’ll find my
failures knees to chest in

the corner of an attic

with their thumb
in mouth and sometimes

I squint my eyes, tilt head, raise
an eyebrow and ask my parents why I’ve never seen my failures

and them in the same room before.

 

 

Julianne Neely, 23, is a writer from New York. She has been previously published in Random Sample Review, Unbroken Journal, Babe Soda Zine, Moon Zine, and Maudlin House. She hates bios but likes Twitter. Follow her there: @juleneely.

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Call for Submissions

Call for submissions for issue #51, as well as our poetry and micro essay contests. Learn more and submit your work here.

New Orleans Review is delighted to announce the publication of its first book, Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance
(Bloomsbury 2019).

Visit the Digital Archive of NOR Print Issues, 1968-2019

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