Speaker
She wants to speak, so I let her. In fact,
I encourage. I coax. I prod her competitive
streak, line shot glasses up on the black lacquer.
I dare her: I’ll bet you can’t drink all of these and still
tell your darkest secrets. I am wily. I use
reverse psychology: You look to me
like the kind of girl who learned to spell “wicked,”
then went home and scrubbed her fingers …
whose tongue dances, but only in a serviceable box step.
And then her words come like fish in a barrel, candy from
a baby, but what will I do with so many fish?
String them, silver, extravagant, in lines
to catch the glint of the sun. In time, they will stink.
Even the wind will not undo them. And what to do
with this surfeit of sweets, these caramel sounds,
this sticky bounty? Pop them down,
one by one, until their cloying, their crusting,
shingles my insides and my pores sweat sugar.
She is next to me — even now, licking her lips
to continue. What can I do but wait? Submit?
Her confessions I will claim as my own.
* * * * *
Fierce
Something animal awoke in me
or, more apt to say, something logical
blinked its lone cold eye. Every cell
and pore welled with what I thought
I had shaken off: the dog’s coat wicking back
the ocean she’d bounded out of.
If my bite were all canine, I might
appease this itch. If my sky were less
moon, I might yet bay wide enough
to take all of it down my open throat.
I could heal everything broken in you
with a brute, dumb tongue.
Feral is the name given to what is wild
by what isn’t. Whatever it was that owned me,
that kept me guarded, has vanished,
has let me go. If you turned now
and fled, yelping into the sea, I would
have to follow you. I would herd the waves.
* * * * *
Confessional
These stars are the cold priests who stoop to hear
my sins — their faces, chiseled white blades
that would cut if I leaned into them, their old
gazes unwinking, not at all surprised.
Tonight is the confessional I waited for —
stark, invitingly moonless, for how
could I strip these deeds of their glitter
before the complicity of a full yellow moon?
Only now, while her face is turned, can I offer
them up, flat and dull as stones. Only in this
blackness that blots their quartz, their feldspar,
could I begin to betray them or pray to let them go.
* * * * *
Concessions
He told me he never dreamed —
that his sleep was nothing more
than the unbroken gray of a filing cabinet.
If any bovine had ever leapt the moon
or bluebird cleared a rainbow,
this was the first he’d heard of it.
Each day for him was a potholed road
of unsynchronized traffic lights.
Luck was a meter with time on it.
He promised that my longing to look up
at stars or tell secrets to angels
was a sickness that could be cured –
that every night noise hid
a banging shutter, every myth
opiates to fog my eyes.
And so to the pirouette of this dance
I’d asked for, I added stones
in my pockets. Leaden shoes.
For this last ride on the carousel,
I dragged my feet in the dust
so he could ride, too.