Drinking
Easing from fixed to felt, mellow waves of breeze, the lean
toward the jugular, maroon insinuation, only there’s no lover, only
forgetting in this globed vineyard, the draining of a breast-
like, breakable curve. Slashes on pavement are strangers pressed on lacquerish
nighttime rain. Almost a painting, a smeary feeling in a blood-warm room.
Now I’m buoyant as a passenger and can withstand
myself. How’s that. The potato chips are delicious, but what the bar-
tender said at his funeral comes back. The night before,
all he ate was a little bag of chips. My heart hurts all over again. There was
still concern in her voice, though he was casked. All our flesh in that red velvet, I
out of my mind in a corner. Now an oak spreads, compassionate,
where he is, and the whip has almost fallen from my hand, in oak-thrown
shade, my punisher asleep, and I go oaky drowsing against.
Failure
Lisa Montgomery was executed one week before Trump left office, becoming the first woman
put to death by the U.S. federal government in 67 years.
I cannot comprehend my daughter’s hair, I cannot stand
before the crumpled animal of it, cannot tend to it with gentleness, I lose
my mind, I go backwards, I elsewhere, I fail in the field after school,
in amniotic fluid spiked with alcohol, I cannot take these bristles for anything
but weapon, a confusion of snarls and angers, as in
the burr and brush of my hiding place that failed me again, I am hit on the head,
I seize and strobe in a too-bright room, a too-loud TV mixing up
her cries and mine, I, I hit back, the garbage smell from the garbage room
telling me – what relief, what guiding hand – what I am.
Erotics
In the foreign salon of coughs
and newspapers’ harrumphs, evenings of British
Trivial Pursuit in which I sat on the floor
like a terrier, head swivelling, knowing not one answer,
and wanting, dog-like, to lie before the fire,
it was finally the last evening, and the youngest
among us, who’d been a haughty jackass,
stifling a laugh when I twisted my ankle,
and whom I’d silently forgiven, sensing he was striving
from a place as awful as my beginning, when he
was mid-speech, and the older man in moth-
bit cashmere and I glanced up at each other and in
unison breathily corrected his pronunciation
of Schuyler, that instant was eclipsed only by being fed
inexplicability by a pregnant stranger a decade
before, in Mississippi, my first oyster.
