|||
One of these days the theater burns down, but not today.
Let me rephrase: I want the flat sound of this place,
its murky groan. I carve shadows from streets. I stutter
through the wall between me & that life. Once I learned
transgression I could never stay warm. Forgiveness
an indent released. In the humid relief of memory,
the tape unsticks. Rusty old waterpark on the edge of the frame.
The laundromat rain-warped. Baseball field crowded with snow.
Houses swimming in light, wire-crossed, lethargic.
No hills here to act as jaws, land corn-rough and bruised.
Forgiveness shoved in an unmarked envelope. I bare
my sins. I bear this name, the one we share. One of these days
the swamp, blackened, will swallow us whole.
Imagine everything made wild again: massacre turned jubilee.
The lake’s tide lush & unmapped. Brackish unmanageable shapes.
This wound open for business. Carcassed. Too much sinew,
chewed tough. Wildflowers writhing on the plane.
Let me rephrase: the ten at night swell, panic-laden.
When the phone call arrived and the glass shattered —
I’ll admit it, I went bone dry, muzzled, my teeth the only thing
still unmarred. Confession delivered right to my doorstep.
I saw the wishbone split but managed to coax out the unshed years.
Afterwards, passenger seat always plaited with your timbre,
never any static on the short drive over, no ash to swallow.
For now: the mangled mornings, havoc a compulsion,
the dream blistering beneath this starving sky.
We stretch out enough for our limbs to hit the asphalt, run until
the ache creeps further behind our spines. The only lie I ever told
was that I could ever really escape.
Once, I knew what I meant:
sun-drunk, unpeeling the layers of the city,
digging for the skeletons of streets.
I catalogued it all, the metallic pulses
of fieldside longings, headlights shining desire lines
as we drifted through parking lots, engine
humming, the map of all known things laid out
before us. Skipping school to go
to Rite Aid bathrooms, where I helped you
lift the haze of remembering, sweltering
heat of a tomorrow turning us raw
with unshed names, freedom in the
rain that turns to coins and drops worthless
dirty copper into our too-warm hands,
which we slotted with a ravenous joy.
What they don’t tell you is how time
turns us to shadow puppets, and thrust
up against this white curtain, it does us no good
to say nothing, to sit and read our palms, lit only
by the glow of the nearest exploding star.
It’s here, so far away from home, where we
only now look up at the quiet side of the expired sky.
What we remember: all the words
we broke our teeth on, every summer song
on the radio home, the pesky motif
that wouldn’t obey what was written
and continued on.
