Five of Swords, for all my death girls - Marty McConnell

Betsy’s in the second stall practicing

with a plastic razor, so I lie on the floor

to listen for the janitor, the cart’s

loose wheel squeaking our names down

the evening-empty hallway. the weeks

she was at Lutheran General, I didn’t

go to visit. but I know from her stories

what the doors looked like, closing,

how they strapped her to the bed

for her own protection. we’re 17

and I adore her despair. I think she’s shining,

fearless, carving herself a body that’s nothing

but light. on the way home, she lets me

drive. tells me there’s a trick

to disintegrating in increments subtle enough

not to trip the alarm wires, to hiding cigarettes

and death from therapists and parents and this,

all my girls have had down: how to go and go

until the night is too fragile or grimy

and then the fanfare, the wild dive

from the spire, the water tower, the clock

yanking its hands back, how to dangle

from the spotlight once everybody’s

watching. 1999: we lie on Angie’s futon

searching the phonebook for institutions

that will take her without insurance, curl

our bodies into still commas of want

to wait for morning. they take

her shoelaces, and her cigarettes, and I watch.

they give her forms and more forms

and I watch. they walk her to the room

with its single bed and single dresser

and unsmashable mirror and I ride

the long, high buzz of the door back

to New York. 2003: Georgiana is an expert

in suicide and poetry. her medicine cabinet rattles

like a jar of vengeful bees. she wants me

to find her. all our idols are martyrs, not one of them

a saint. her hair drops like cabernet all the way

to her waist. and how she needs me. my simple body

becomes bread in her mouth, I’m whiskey,

an obliteration who’ll get up in the morning

to call the hospital and make coffee. oh,

my pretty ones in love with the beast

of disappearing, there are many ways

to give birth. not one is without pain.

there are almost as many ways to die

as there are to love. tonight, I drink to you

who chose to keep going, who moved

through my body like a chemical

I could not keep. the night stands outside

like a hungry dog on an old chain, the scent

of lilies rising from the half moons of his teeth.

go ahead. tuck your babies into bed

and lovers’ hair behind their soft ears, as if

there’s nothing left to fear.

twilight musings - Charles Bukowski

the drifting of the mind.

the slow loss, the leaking away.

one’s demise is not very interesting.

from my bed I watch 3 birds through the east window:

one coal black, one dark brown, the

other yellow.

as night falls I watch the red lights on the bridge blink on and off.

I am stretched out in bed with the covers up to my chin.

I have no idea who won at the racetrack today.

I must go back into the hospital tomorrow.

why me?

why not?

LETTER TO A LOST FRIEND - RICHARD SHELTON

War, trade, religious debts to discharge, these are mostly the reasons

for men’s distant journeyings: but you take pleasure in distant journeys

without reason.                                                               – St.-John Perse

we do not realize what we want

until we learn

what we are willing to give up for it

and you did God knows you did

when swimming was no longer possible

you learned to sink you learned

to live at the bottom of the sea

now tell me of the chambers where you sleep

tell me it does not matter

lie if you must

is your bed luminous is it festooned

with seaweed do all your narrow windows

open onto water

is the tide kind to you

forgive me if I do not understand

last night a stranger asked me what

gives you most pleasure and before I thought

I answered her revenge

PARTY - Andrea Gibson

I was 13 the first time

I drank so much the bugs stopped.

A high school party

at Chrissy Olden’s house,

a senior, whose mom worked overnights

at the truck stop and embarrassed the customers

by not being embarrassed to lose

a solid 10 minutes

rambling over the register

about who wrote what in her yearbook

in 1971.

I was sitting in the middle

of the living room

on a corduroy couch

telling Katie Mathews,

the only other 8th grader there,

something about the temperature of music.

Somewhere there was a DJ

holding his finger under the faucet

of the party.

Every few minutes

I’d be handed a bottle of something

that razored my tonsils all the way down.

If someone had told me

it was nail polish remover

I would have believed them

but I would not have stopped drinking

the red off of my heart.

Do you remember

the first time you knew you

were absolutely safe?

I stumbled into the bathroom

and locked the door behind me

so I could smile as wide as I had to

without anybody knowing I had to.

The mirror was caked with Aqua Net.

There was enough hair in the sink

to mistake the drain for a pet.

The last person who had vomited

in the toilet had missed the toilet.

A year prior, just before my grandfather

swallowed the worm of his life,

he leaned his yellow face into my terrified eyes

and made me promise to Never

go near the bottle.

Nobody had to tell me

that booze was a terrible way to die.

But this was a party,

and I was person for the very first time.

You won’t know what I mean

unless you’ve been there too.

The bugs drowned till morning.

Say what you want about addiction.

I pulled the hair out of the drain with my hands.

I took it home.

I gave it a name.

Bad Habits - Richard Shelton

how could I leave you behind

old friends

since I am going nowhere

here is good and there is evil

and again I fall like a drunk

between two stools

of all the things I have

I cherish most

what no one else would want

At the Restaurant - Stephen Dunn

Six people are too many people

and a public place the wrong place

for what you're thinking--

stop this now.

Who do you think you are?

The duck à l'orange is spectacular,

the flan the best in town.

But there among your friends

is the unspoken, as ever,

chatter and gaiety its familiar song.

And there's your chronic emptiness

spiraling upward in search of words

you'll dare not say

without irony.

You should have stayed at home.

It's part of the social contract

to seem to be where your body is,

and you've been elsewhere like this,

for Christ's sake, countless times;

behave, feign.

Certainly you believe a part of decency

is to overlook, to let pass?

Praise the Caesar salad. Praise Susan's

black dress, Paul's promotion and raise.

Inexcusable, the slaughter in this world.

Insufficient, the merely decent man.