A needle of sapphires and thieves.
There must be a mistake, you don’t come visit
me, people don’t, I visit people, that’s how it works, who
live in more interesting cities, I choose cities what never
freeze, refuse to move where winter can’t keep palm trees,
and you are you, that young; so there is definitely an error
or escape. I should wash my hair more, count scabs. The
sores number as in exes or times I’ve scrambled to throw
the cat in the carrier—once blind psychotic, walking in her
dish, now bleeding out across the new lavender fleece
blanket, drooling urine so frightening arterial red that I
ran them, justified. The traffic lights. But might have done
anyway because the rule is: don’t scare passengers, but
when I go alone I barely notice, I drive like I don’t want
to live, I do and I don’t, you don’t know, it’s complicated.
The friend who dumps me thinks I’m alcoholic, the one
who picks me back up again after a year, I’m an old stone
or little object on her dresser, that postcard altar we all had
when we still sent them. Just a petite chose pour souvenir,
that’s fair, I don’t dare read his emails and what happened
to me was not all that bad. If I had screaming nightmares it
might make sense. Mediocre abuse means mediocre wounds,
so nothing that dramatic. The trapeze angel died of heart
disease at 45, this could be my last three months. See, I’m
actually good with that. I’ve known a lot of love, and given
some. They’ll forgive me in an urn. I was always the reason
I couldn’t have nice things and that includes, what, your gift:
tiny feather on a necklace that I continually lip, mouth at, run
over my teeth and tongue as chain and charm go bronze
from skin and saliva, it’s been a fabulous party, I’ve tried every
drink, now clutch at different dressmakers, urgent: thank
you, here, I’m done with this, will you please have it back now.
Pyrrhic
Now that there’s nothing left of you but a bankrupt casino, all the dinettes
and red leatherette chairs for sale, now you write things like This sounds like
a threat but I assure you is not, followed by a really scary one, somewhere
around the time you lavishly said You deserve to die in a fire, not going quite so
far as to name the one who might set it—
I stop here, chop lacinato kale and sweet potatoes.
In addition to my tiny sharp gold- bladed sewing scissors, you seem to have made
off with the vegetable scrubber too, so I use a Brillo pad. Does this count, am I
blaming you? Because you cannot endure any blame. It must be displaced.
Even my most verbal female friends never want to have meta-
conversations, whenever our closeness ruptures they wait a time, passing,
a reliquary, I acquiesce to a slow closing over, then we resume as if ignorable,
which is not a word, and I try to be cool about all of this, I do. I did. But my
girlfriends only break my heart, unlike what your mathematical countering
took:
sometimes I’m allergic in spring, and when I suck the snot back
down my throat, salty across the soft palate, abruptly I feel afraid and dismayed,
why? it’s a flashback to semen, could that ever be for someone else a happy
memory, what things are happy:
sonicleaning and autoclaving surgical
packs, folding blue paper drapes, mopping kennels, scrubbing tissue clumps off
hemostats with a toothbrush dipped in chlorhex, these are satisfying, pleasantly
tiresome and when you’ve done them you can look at the thing and say, it is done,
I did that, bolt up a shelf with wall anchors, drill holes for new towel rods, so
now even when you cough ugly insinuations into my inbox (the reason you are
suicidal is that you know you are too worthless to live) and complain sarcastically
about my pyrrhic victory—but I don’t know what that means, pyrrhic because
you didn’t like it that I left? or that you don’t know where I moved?—
now manage
for whole long days to forget about your baby rage, just sit on the concrete stoop
staring blankly out into the strange yard, kitty carefully investigates the broken canes
of old rose bushes—then at that second if there is anything much better than
eating unwashed blueberries out of the carton in dumb peace,
I have no idea what that could be.
Glitter & plaid.
Throw over your man, I say, and come.
— Virginia Woolf
Three of them are named Katherine, like the year I got dumped twice
in the same parking lot (DeVargas Mall, Santa Fe, New Mexico), it strains
credulity, even when it happens to you part of you doesn’t quite believe it,
the theorist says the queer sixth sense and you have it even as a tiny girl, watch
Batman while not understanding the difference between kitsch and camp
but knowing what it means when they’re tied up writhing like that,
I don’t know if the married ones do know. I think they think it’d be
easy, like going to a new restaurant or trying a fun combination of skirt
and blouse so it’s up to me to be superheroic, save us from their
unboundaried cluelessness, when I handed her the box of mineral water
in the dark and accidentally backhanded her in the tit did she flinch, I
cringed over it for weeks, do all platonic friendships get watered down
next to the lurid potential my imagination freights, one lives in Estonia
and in Ã…rhus, one in Brisbane, one in Newcastle, one in Nebraska, you
can’t make this up, two are named Elizabeth. I can’t make up
that time when the one letter lost in the post was the hotel reservation
in the purple envelope, can’t make up that he used to call me every
time when his wife went out of town, wandering the house in boxers
eating plastic-wrapped cheese with sharp mustard for meals and crying,
can’t make up the ferocity that seizes you in the grim local minimum
of the night so roll facedown in bed and bite the sheets but laughing,
he thinks it’s facile, that my substituting constellations of beloveds is a
challenge for anyone trying to love me, thinks he knows what I haven’t
written: like I’d let fingerprints get all over three hundred pages of angel,
like it’s painless to admire her artless selfies (scoop between collarbone
and shoulder, curve of back, slope of neck, basin of attraction), to learn
names of cats and husbands, like it comes naturally to stand down, be
politic and distant instead of shriek beneath her window with lute
tuned to a unison drone, my teacher warned me, you’re from another
century, a different economy, you don’t think in terms of markets but like
a troubadour, as if pouring everything at her feet in a pool would make you more
valuable. But this is capitalism, when you flood the market it makes you worth
less. And I am. Is there a problem with that, no, no there isn’t, I’ve
drawn it down, swallowed hard. Sleep with an arm wrapped around
the hard belly of a guitar like an undergrad. You don’t get to give me education
is how she shut it down. I told stories to spinneret across space, sketch
an analogous weltanschauung but she informed me otherwise; I just
sound patronizing. She’s right. Hey. Listen. I’ve stopped everything.
Don’t cypher anymore. Said I was sorry, nodded tightly and agreed.
Careful to excise the bowerbird’s need, delete its gifts. Fold up
the sepia love-letter of misspelled Arabic that she read once, put that
shit away. I button my flannel to the throat. I smile with half my face.
JSA Lowe's poems have appeared most recently in Black Warrior Review, Chicago Review, DIAGRAM, Hobart, Salt Hill Journal, Third Coast, and Versal, as well as previously in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, and Salamander. Her chapbook DOE was published by Particle Series Books, and the chapbook Cherry-emily is available from dancing girl press. She has a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston, where she currently teaches. She lives on Galveston Island.