Tessa Bolsover

from Exits

black grape serum
discount fish oil Halsey
/Nostrand violet
foam in gutter always
late-stage cataclysm
flowers you turn
back as if to speak

eros, linguists say, is the illumination of a tear or seam
once thought to be continuous. how arrows seek themselves
through contact and divide. tell me you can see me here
in real time. from the train out of New Jersey, mounds
of unearthed gravel seem to tremble in the semi-opaque
row of windows. semi-opaque mirrors in the air unconscious
flash like migrant sturgeons up from darkness and recede

dissent gathers chthonic. in the sudden draft of cave air
between bottle deposits on Cypress. in the green ferocity
of spring, the burnt-out alcove of a car. in public pools
and bioluminescent algae. in violet saliva, subway stairwells,
all our calculated risk. in the exactitude of light before
the riot. in all the hours we’ve sold and cannot live without

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Tessa Bolsover is a poet based in Brooklyn, NY. Her first book, Crane, was published by Black Ocean in 2025. Her poems have appeared in Peripheries, Annulet, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Brooklyn Rail, Black Sun's digital vestiges, The Slow Poetry in America Newsletter, The Swan, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Brown University and is currently pursuing a PhD at Duke. She is also a founding editor of auric press.