Junk Drawer Heart is the new pamphlet by New York based poet McCaela Prentice.

Playing with pop culture to explore and push emotional exploration, Junk Drawer Heart is at once humorous, heartfelt and an immediately arresting collection of poetry. It also includes some self-confessed love letters to Greek mythology or Frank Ocean disguised as poems.

McCaela’s poetry has previously been featured in Ghost City Press, Lammergeier Magazine, and Small Orange Journal.

Junk Drawer Heart by McCaela Prentice

Poetry pamphlet – 26 pages

£5.00

Taken from Junk Drawer Heart

–

The Summer Maroon 5 Promised She Will Be Loved
 
You got skinny into August
like a hypodermic needle. You still take me
to Sam’s Corner for the best hot dogs in town;
I can’t wait to be old enough for coffee at 7-Eleven.
Your boyfriend is not Adam Levine, his band just covers
This Loveat Neal & Pam’s on weekends.
You want to live on stilts. When we walk
along the Grand Strand, you point at For Sale signs
and inground pools twenty yards from the ocean.
I’ve got to know why you want to be so high
up. Why your arms are always bruised;
why your roommate always sleeps.
The men you serve at the bar start asking
how old I am, so you start sending me
to the Arcade.

–

The Girl at the Gas Station has Blood in Her Mouth
 
I pray for small things
like chips in the next aisle 
and for lipstick on her teeth.
 
I imagine it looking black on the laminate
in the damning fluorescent
but nothing falls from her or far 
from where you held it. I want to look
at a map of all the places I have bled:
 
on Wharf Street dizzy from a tall pour;
in Brooklyn onto sheets already stained;
on the walk home from Rosie’s with it
pooling in my palms. 
 
There are no words 
for when pieces of us leave but I need
to name the places I have left them.
 
Grief is a thing that does not sleep, 
that gnaws at the bones that cradle it - 
I drop change on the counter 
and walk out in hurry - 
it is never far from where it left you.