with audio by Susan Culver
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with audio by Susan Culver
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how to tell a story in a dead language the fires scarlet fever night drive
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Perhaps it begins with cell memory.
The
ability of the body
to
recall azaleas, or bruises.
To
remember the verb forget
long
after the night has leaned
a bit
closer and whispered
something like your name.
Still
year by year, there is less of you,
but
harder, bones empty as a sparrow.
This
penchant for stolen cigarettes
and
driving without headlights.
The
scars beneath your temple
and a
wrist that aches when it rains.
Now,
you tell me your husband
is
kind, in his way. Smells of gasoline
when
he spreads you beneath the eaves
on a
quiet street. I can only think
of how
at twelve, we watched
the
Egyptians. The museum's cool
fiberglass labyrinth. How they
carefully rinsed the organs of the dead,
placed
them in their dark jars.
Forget
how words signify
color:
how cup is blue.
Curtains, white. Her mother,
wrought iron and canary.
And
her, red as a burning
dress.
A hem blackening
as the
trees explode.
Still,
she has drawn maps.
Spelled out her name
against the windows.
Ten
years later and she
won’t
know which is worse.
The
sheets smoldering
on the
line, or the ones
wrinkling her bed.
Miles
above the fire line,
you’d
think it was the beginning.
But it
started before:
deep
ruts in the road,
semis
on the interstate.
How
she followed them sleeping.
Always
barefoot, always west.
Always
the dead pets.
Dogs
lost to flames.
Kittens drowned in pillowcases.
In
dreams, her mother
combs
knots from her hair,
wades
into a boiling river.
There’s danger in the quick
of her
nails, the matches
beneath the mattress.
Ten
years later,
and
you won’t even be able to tell.
There
are ghosts in the body.
More
precisely, manifest themselves
as a
flutter beneath the ribs.
This
desire to string your body
like
electric lines along darkening
roads.
To etch the stars across
the
slope of my shoulders.
I know
these fevers.
You
bring apples. Novels.
But
still the night tastes like coins,
wrecks
us. Not the twist of metal
but
the memory of red. The gas station,
Tuscon,
where you bent me
over
the sink. Later told me
your
mom never touched
you
unless it was a beating.
See,
there’s an error in the story.
A
failure in the thread. I was
seven
once, and sick, and my
mother, all-night, danced
in the
corners of my room.
Gorged
herself on gelatin
and
the tv’s static hum.
I’m
rattled with the spirits
of
dead women, damp
sheets
twisting into rope.
All
night, I dream of eggs
shaking in their little cups.
Blood
in the yolk.
Morning.
night
drive
-WINNER OF THE ADROITLY PLACED WORD AWARD
On
route seven, crosses line
the
highway like arms
and
this, a seduction.
The
towns with names
like
Elizabeth and Lena.
how a
thing happens
or it
doesn’t. Count
the
variations of red
in my
hair and you’d know
I was
a liar, my tongue
humming like a tuning fork.
My
trick of concentration
is a
word that begins
in the
diaphragm
and
spreads to the limbs
as the
headlights flatten
the
asphalt, skim
the
open throats of bullfrogs.
Still,
I fear clearings.
The
verb scribbled and unwritten.
The
place we come to
where
the night is shaped
like a
spine. Where my thighs
bathe
in the radio’s thin heat.
Here,
all the girls have small bones,
the
smallest. A languor of yellow
scarves and spelling bees.
The
day gives things names and we
hide
them between our thighs,
beneath our mother’s mattress.
We
make nice with the books, with the dishes,
with
the men behind the blue shed.
The
ones lurking in the bus-stop woods,
crouching near water heaters in dark basements.
I can
lie clean through my white teeth.
My
white dress round my waist
and my
panties in the bushes.
To be
expected, there are
the
usual accidents on train tracks,
in
third floor bathrooms.
Nothing can be assumed.
I was
a mouth and worry came to me.
I was
gingered and soft like a pear.
Now,
the saint of fingers through hair,
of
imperfect engines. Paper gone pink
at the
edges, and the whiskey-throated
woman
finished singing. The saint of fifth
grade
valentines crumpling in desks.
Of
mouths pressed to palms
inside
sleeping bags. Of chairs
and
sevens and the dark seats
of
movie houses. Saint of imaginary
tables
in lengthening rooms,
of
aqueducts and porcelain cup handles.
Of
lanterns in trees and the all the kitchens
on
fire. The saint of the beautifully
drowned. Of yawns and picnic tables.
Backseats and trailer parks.
Soap
and tequila.
Saint
of irregular seams.
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