Poetry |

“Speaker,” “Fierce,” “Confessional” & “Concessions”

Speaker

 

 

She wants to speak, so I let her. In fact,

I encourage. I coax. I prod her competitive

streak, line shot glasses up on the black lacquer.

 

I dare her: I’ll bet you can’t drink all of these and still

tell your darkest secrets. I am wily. I use

reverse psychology: You look to me

 

like the kind of girl who learned to spell “wicked,”

then went home and scrubbed her fingers …

whose tongue dances, but only in a serviceable box step.

 

And then her words come like fish in a barrel, candy from

a baby, but what will I do with so many fish?

String them, silver, extravagant, in lines

 

to catch the glint of the sun. In time, they will stink.

Even the wind will not undo them. And what to do

with this surfeit of sweets, these caramel sounds,

 

this sticky bounty? Pop them down,

one by one, until their cloying, their crusting,

shingles my insides and my pores sweat sugar.

 

She is next to me — even now, licking her lips

to continue. What can I do but wait? Submit?

Her confessions I will claim as my own.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Fierce

 

 

Something animal awoke in me

or, more apt to say, something logical

blinked its lone cold eye. Every cell

and pore welled with what I thought

I had shaken off: the dog’s coat wicking back

the ocean she’d bounded out of.

 

If my bite were all canine, I might

appease this itch. If my sky were less

moon, I might yet bay wide enough

to take all of it down my open throat.

I could heal everything broken in you

with a brute, dumb tongue.

 

Feral is the name given to what is wild

by what isn’t. Whatever it was that owned me,

that kept me guarded, has vanished,

has let me go. If you turned now

and fled, yelping into the sea, I would

have to follow you. I would herd the waves.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Confessional

 

 

These stars are the cold priests who stoop to hear

my sins — their faces, chiseled white blades

that would cut if I leaned into them, their old

gazes unwinking, not at all surprised.

 

Tonight is the confessional I waited for —

stark, invitingly moonless, for how

could I strip these deeds of their glitter

before the complicity of a full yellow moon?

 

Only now, while her face is turned, can I offer

them up, flat and dull as stones. Only in this

blackness that blots their quartz, their feldspar,

could I begin to betray them or pray to let them go.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Concessions

 

 

He told me he never dreamed —

that his sleep was nothing more

than the unbroken gray of a filing cabinet.

 

If any bovine had ever leapt the moon

or bluebird cleared a rainbow,

this was the first he’d heard of it.

 

Each day for him was a potholed road

of unsynchronized traffic lights.

Luck was a meter with time on it.

 

He promised that my longing to look up

at stars or tell secrets to angels

was a sickness that could be cured –

 

that every night noise hid

a banging shutter, every myth

opiates to fog my eyes.

 

And so to the pirouette of this dance

I’d asked for, I added stones

in my pockets. Leaden shoes.

 

For this last ride on the carousel,

I dragged my feet in the dust

so he could ride, too.

Contributor
Melanie McCabe

Melanie McCabe is the author of three poetry collections, most recently The Night Divers (Terrapin Books, 2022), as well as What The Neighbors Know and History of the Body, and a memoir, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams (Univ. of New Orleans Press, 2017). Her essays and poems have appeared in The Washington Post, The Georgia Review, The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, and Threepenny Review.

Posted in Poetry

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.