decompose

By S. Fey

Our life contains several lives as well as several deaths; we attempt to understand these little rebirths through poetry. 

decompose explores pruning our past to make room for future growth; the expanse we are offered through the crush of heartbreak, discovering family beyond our original home, finding new meaning in our own name – S. Fey picks these timeless themes like roses from a flourishing garden to compose a thorny and succulent bouquet of living, loss, and rebirth throughout the rejuvenating pages of their debut poetry collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Not a Cult
• Release date: Apr 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781945649547

S. Fey

S. Fey is a Lesbian and Non-Binary writer living in LA. Currently, they are the founder of the Luminaries Poetry workshop, and poetry editor at Hooligan Magazine. They love to be with their friends, but mostly, to beat them at Mario Party. They tweet @sfeycreates.

Book preview

DecomposeTitlePageCopyrightPageSpace

For Nick. I stopped trying to write you poems

when I realized they were all for you.

Table of Contents

I tell my friend, the painter, that my favorite color is orange

I haven’t really made up a name for it yet

Golden

The cost of consistency

You should always be gentle with yourself

Unclean

I’m not mad

Wings

Dinosaur Spine

A Great Nuclear Evil

Everyone calls me their husband

lesbians are exhausting

poem in which you get to be a kid

ice cream before bed

Dangerous

I can’t focus right now but who can blame me?

Fourth Generation

With two fingers I can squeeze the sun

Chicago

2 / ∞

In many ways, I’m like a cornered spider

Pop

I want to text you but I’m tired

bad ideas

from the body

Are you coming home?

Beach day

It comes in waves

Homecoming

Bus Stop

Associative Amnesia

Edwin says I deserve to be loved with precision

I’m not worried about it

good

sometimes we are wrong

Main Street

potential

Lightless

music in the mundane

Cold Turkey

I want to lay on the couch,

Zora gives me a new middle name

write a poem about wishes

when you encounter the devil

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Our sufferings do not magically end; instead we are able to wisely alchemically recycle them. They become the abundant waste that we use to make new growth possible.

—bell hooks

"There’s some kind of burning inside me.

It’s kept me from falling apart."

—Mitski

I tell my friend, the painter, that my favorite color is orange.

He says he doesn’t really believe in orange, that it’s just the space between yellow & red. He’s not exactly wrong. Orange was known in olde English as geoluhread, meaning yellow-red. It wasn’t until the 16th century that we started calling it orange— & even then, the color was named after the fruit, not the other way around. He said he thought my color would be mustard, I said it’s that too. Carmen says my color is coral with blood. Fitting, light with a price. I’d say my favorite color is