originally published in Your Impossible Voice, Issue One, Summer 2013
At the end of the world,
a Tuesday, I crouched
with a blue notebook
in a concrete bunker
and drank schnapps
until my liver candied
like perfumed gristle
and I groaned
writing poems
is hard.
At my birth, a Sunday,
my mother, a nurse,
told me the story
about the woman
who stank. She lived
in a tower, that woman.
Or what might’ve been
a tower if the woman
had been a princess
and the tower
hadn’t been
a mental ward.
Here on the deck
of this ship
that’s tossing
in this bottle
my father cast
on roiling waters
under a picture-book
starry sky, I think
about that woman
and all the things
I should have told
my daughters
when I was alive
and smelled better.
Sometimes I get angry
and the bats
in my head win
and I enjoy
letting them go.
Worse than leaning
against the rough bark
of a tree and watching
your heart flap flap
flap off a cliff,
I would tell
my daughters,
is taking it back
when it returns.
Forgiveness, yes,
but forget nothing.
I didn’t smell
all that good
when I was alive
and I am sorry
about the bats.
Some weeks I drop
a pencil in whiskey
to measure what’s left
of my brain past stroke,
past dipthongs that stretch
for days like sound
might make sense of things.
I should have apologized
to my wife at my wake
for the long nights
of walking downstairs
to the kitchen and drinking
one double after another
and eating cold pork chops
in the open fridge door
when neighbors thought
the light meant I was writing
a poem. I should have said
poems are hard to write
after a second shower
when you still smell
like the dead sparrow
they found when they put
that woman in the tub
and spread her legs.
Decades before I died,
I pissed on my hands
so I could grip a bat
without gloves
and lace doubles
down both lines
and some nights
hit the ball out
of the park, twice.
Life was easier then.
Writing poems,
I’ll tell my daughters,
is hard when all we do
is die and folks spend
money to make sure
no one smells us.
My daughters
play volleyball
and soccer,
run cross country.
It’s not the same
and it probably is.
Three inches of water,
my mother, the R.N.,
told me, is what
they put in the tub
for that woman’s
sponge bath.
Mental wards,
she had to know,
help a story,
make us look
at the wrong thing.
No one thought
to look there,
inside her.
I’m guessing
the story
has holes.
So do we.
We are nothing
without them.
Photo By: pangalactic gargleblaster and the heart of gold
