Lydia Rae Bush

Lydia Rae Bush is a poet exploring themes of embodiment and social-emotional development. Rae’s work is Best of the Net nominated and can be found in publications such as Vocivia Magazine and Sage Cigarettes Magazine. Lydia’s chapbook Free Bleeding is forthcoming with dogleech books.

Easy read of the poems in the images above:

Honor

You draw your knee closer to you in the sand,
tilt it, push it back
as the tide rushes out.

I knead my fingers behind me,
begin to stretch my stomach out, then stay
upright, face incoming misting foam.

When you murmur that a dragon brings out your loud side,
I suggest that it must have so many skills as jewels
and virtues as crowns,

ask if its gift is not one
of the greatest
we can give.

The corners of your lips
curl, you exhale,
ask if I’ve a loud side.

I inhale,
hold,
choose,

say I do not identify
myself in terms of parts,
of noises, or quiets—

that I merely
perceive of myself
as having been freed or silenced.

Powder

after “Sand”, written by Jordan Johnson, Taylor Cameron Upsahl, Michael Ross Pollack, Dove Olivia Cameron, and Stefan Johnson

I'm like one big puzzle;
what's up with all these lines and curves?
Fragments of myself always

held together.

It's not that people have
too many of my pieces.
More, it's the way my pieces would fit inside people's

hands if they would wrap around them.

It's the way I don't feel the callouses that would trace and yet for once
can still feel my own outline—
I am made up of all the pieces with which I want

people to play. I want to be

picked up, inspected, held a little nearer
to the light.
Hell, I would even risk getting broken, but, instead, what am I?

Porcelain,

fine china—hollow
and beautiful.
Maybe a little too

obviously patterned and shiny for my own good.