Pharmhouse
Your mother took me out to bottle-feed the cattle.
I came home to you & found the door swelled shut.
Maybe I couldn’t find a key. Maybe it was November.
Looking back, I found white lines to crush into horizons.
What’s meant to be the limit of what’s visible to us?
Couldn’t tow the winters straight. Couldn’t find the line.
I always turned the corner as the sky was falling in
to black or white again. The paper’s early headline
just another black out poem, a flurry of December
or a blurred April sky. Grape-eyed, purple, fat-lipped,
we were bad blood on the rise. We played the stakes
like vines & coiled our fists right through our mouths.
I dared you doubled over as a doppelganger sick in bed
to lick my legs to say the calves we named that summer
weren’t yet slaughtered but looking back to see if you would
say the tags weren’t numbered from the day you first laid
eyes on them. My pick-me-up, my free card, joyride, trusted
dive bar to break dawn. By heart I memorized your number
in the cell. Guarded, pacing, unaware of snow that settled
on the county jail, I guess my eyes were bigger than my heart.
