Corbin Louis
The first time I made Jen come she called me
son of Horace, but I told her I’m an orphan star
That I was conceived by a line of coke and a
lonely girl dashing to the borderline in her head
She thought I was joking and maybe I was
but both of us knew that our past lives were
the same life and in every one of them we
lived in a pyramid by a river named ghost
I looked at her for 5-minutes and finally said,
‘you make shrines out of sweat’ and she smiled
and said ‘don’t confuse shrines with graveyards’
I felt like the room was coming apart so I
begged her to spit in my mouth and when
she did I tasted aluminum and vinegar
‘Jen,’ I said ‘nothing can come between us
but the walls of your last breath, so don’t
close me out unless you gotta die’
‘Honey,’ she said ‘when you come like
that you might as well be dead already’
***
A recent Jack Straw Writer’s Resident and MFA graduate at the University of Washington, Corbin Louis is a Seattle native making work out of a legacy of grunge and rain and illness. Each piece serves as a form of sublimation, transforming dysfunction into arrangements of self-reflection and cultural critique. Corbin’s goal as an artist is to garner awareness and support around mental illness by creating pieces that shriek for understanding, and he has been published by Best American Experimental Writing, Random Sample Review, Visible Poetry Project and others.