Bitch
It doesn’t matter how many nights we stargaze on the roof
Suggesting I’m ready, hinting I do, I mean it, do you?
We’ve been panting after the Dog Star for some time,
Craning our necks back against the hot shingles but
The light from bliss will not reach us for a million years
And the glow-in-the-dark stars above my lofted bed
Are a sophomoric substitute, so I will continue to instigate
Arguments as if we haven’t charted all this before, as if
Mercury in retrograde could be blamed if only we had
The forethought to consider that the nature of light is delay.
We failed to notice that which didn’t blind us;
When did the floor become covered in tufts of
Fur? I swear, I grayed at the muzzle trying to learn new
Tricks, and chasing my tail and never flicking the switch,
Never crossing my mind that the plastic stars spent their days
Hidden, taking up light. I should’ve been there with stopwatch
In hand, bracing myself for Polar Night, but instead I bite at fleas
And mange, straining against the chain staked in the yard.
How many times will we ascend past the ceiling, still surprised
That Sirius’ pack never illuminates the ladder enough? How many
Broken collars and nicked ears and dirt on my back
Before I admit I’m a dog that fights belly up?
“Mono Bitch” image courtesy of www.ruffrootcreative.com
So Frat
You tell me this is a small fucking town
as if I don’t know.
I’ve been strolling these midnight streets
howling things like
“the next plague will be borne
on the back off too much hand sanitizer”
and “eric schmidt is the devil,” crestfallen, see,
my dad won’t let my brother
and his band rent out his studio,
rationalizing “just because they’re your
family doesn’t make them mine,”
and I will cower under his
all too heavy man-spine.
I will not mention my brother
until the next (round of) blue moon
when I mention him only because I have to.
Likewise my mother only heard of you, my lover
in the past tense and wants me to come home
more than I care to
and all my texts will go unanswered
because I promised and couldn’t provide
and the sound waves behind my back
will be a terse static venom that leaves me
running for the open road where
I’m neither here nor there
and neither is anything else.
She doesn’t know, dad doesn’t know-
my blood-borne brothers look
nothing like me and have only heard
in my Paul Bunyan’d legends–
the open wounds the concrete
gave me on rainy nights
when all we had to be was
there for each other and I was too busy
I-40 feels like a clogged artery keeping
my heart from loving and pumping like it should
and it only goes two ways:
home and home and no matter how many
leases I sign I cannot leave one or
fully reside in the other.
So the most quality time I’m getting
is when I passed you at the bus stop
and looped around to take you home with me,
like how my grandfather used to deliver puppies
in burlap sacks when we already had whole dynasties
of stray dogs and barn cats that came cooing
and squealing and mewling to the sacrificial
bowls of milk underneath the woodpile,
in the same way I swear to God
my mom rips my heart out somewhere on the interstate
I’m flying down as if there were no extradition between
who I was and who I’m trying to be.
It’s in politics like these that I’m all pluralities
I’m sorry, dad, I’m sorry
I can’t keep a job for more than a year
so it’s me and my schizophrenic resume
trying to find work that can hold me down.
Like the Dalai Lama I’ve been attempting
to find myself at every red light between home
and Hillsborough, my closet in the back of my car
and every precious possession committed to the Cloud.
I have no space for photo albums and souvenirs–
all I’ve got are a collection of cigarette boxes
scattered across the dashboard, scars
whose lies are always better than the truth for
and words that come to my lips in threes:
i don’t know i gotta go i love you i’m so sorry
and, sometimes, please come back.
I have four outfits for all occasions
and so much fucking style, it isn’t til I’m in some bar
soaking wet and inviting you home with me
that I realize I don’t have a hand basket for Hell:
You made the right decision not to leave.
In some former life King Solomon must have decreed
“cut the bitch in half” and now
I’m bleeding out through my traveled feet
in ten-toed perfect prongs over the spaces in between.
–
Salem Dockery is a poet living in Carrboro, North Carolina, and her work has appeared in Carolina Passport and After the Pause. She tweets things rarely related to literature at www.twitter.com/SelahAran