Two Poems
Image courtesy of Sam Winickoff.
Navigation Practice
When your departure growls in your stomach,
it’s time to finally unfurl yourself
across your town to the most southwest
corner. Pinwheel your ankles only across
the grimiest cigarette, sidewalk crusts
until they ache from edges and the rain
the sky continues to withhold, grow thick from.
Breathe in at last with lungs unhitched—
Inhale, exhale the fruit-flied smell of meat,
the unmasked ketchup stains, the burning
rubber. The bubbling up of
laundromats (and what they cover).
Let it chill you to consume and
wonder if you’re cut from the same bone.
The campaign stickers on the backs of stop
signs gray and peel. Collect them in
your waistband: you may find they are
coordinates someday. When your town is
swept and shuttered, the things in the mud are
clues left by its body: lawn geese and shoe-
laces the skin discarded.
Push against the places your knees have grown
from—past the slanting house with the truck
breathing outside, past the graveyard blinking
eyelids of yellow leaves. Let your chest
flare neon & openopenopen
as you pass. Let your pulse be a beacon
for others, searching as you are searching
for places they escaped, had forsaken
too quickly. Soon this town may only open
its mouth to you in a strip mall parking
lot, hundreds of miles away. Every time
the sidewalk splits, glimpse the glint of its
teeth. When you’re lost, retrace the tightness
in your stomach.
(You may wonder if a town
is made of what remains
or what has left.
yes. yes. yes.)
The Snake and the Water Glass
“It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand.”
-Bram Stoker, Dracula
She was just an extra, at first:
flinging dark green tendrils
across her moonlit shoulders, tipping
her glass at me. I refused
to nod at her.
I circled through the rooms
of the house, past graying people
crying in the corners. On each
saw-dust doorknob I found mercurial
fingerprints. All doors led to
the kitchen, where she played
a water glass with cunning hands,
the ringing sweet, then sharper.
Just like heaven, she hissed, only
anyone can do it.
And though I knew her
slither, and some of what was in
her closet, I let the glass’s rim
meet with my mouth. I drank. Then with her teeth
she ripped the steel wool from my eyes.
I thought I saw so deep, but
I had flipped, so it was
a resurfacing—
And when I woke, it was only
to a smoke detector ringing
at nothing but my fingers’ failure
to stifle it. Still, I smile when I see the
stain they leave behind. The silver.