HOLDING THE LOOSE BONES CLOSE
My mother the morning of her surgery lies
in a room where I am not
The angelbones her hair is
tied fraying in hospital cotton
There are plans to remove
the knot of gut from her throat
where it has climbed and come to rest so she can not
eat and sometimes breathing
feels like so much heartbreak / I imagine metallic choirs of fingers
itching their way into freckled motherskin, doctors with hands
like chariots, like
gravediggers, like men who have come to take something
and promise lack will make you whole
//
The morning I do not know
is the morning of my mother’s surgery I dream
following her through small-town dusty streets
dragging behind me an antique white rocking chair
she will not let me put down or give away, says
it will only be a little further to where we are going
As a child I chewed holes in the sleeves of my sweaters
We lived in a broken home but by that
I just mean the oven handle
was hanging off its hinges and there were dents
in the doors nobody asked about
One dent in particular,
she was holding the baby / When the bottle flew / Clipped her hair / She
could have left him then
They are happy now / I believe / Their ceiling fan carved
in the shape of a fish
//
I do not know my mother
will refuse surgery, will choose to live
in pain a little while longer for hope
is a wildbright thing that nests like a dog
giving birth under the house or a cat
hiding away to die and I drive
to work that morning, passing
ads for touchless breast exam and car wash
all the songs on the radio about learning
not to trust someone who could love you or pretend to
My father, my sister
with silver in her veins—
I want to ask
when does a fish hook caught in the netting of the heart
become a bear’s claw clamped over it
This gouging, an inheritance
stuffed with tissue paper and wet yellow yarn
//
When she looks at pictures of my father, dead now
after the powerlines drunken cut
the beloved stuffed doll that never spoke again after he threw
her out into the snow / When we were only babies / How much she hid
sparkled shards of if not pain than pretty
hurt things / Her whole red smile a promise:
one day you will have a hole like that and you will learn to sing within it
//
My mother kept all her children’s baby teeth
in a plastic bag hoarded in her bedside
dresser drawer so she could sleep
dragonlike guarding our innocent bones
The poet writes of burying
her children’s teeth in the garden
One of these strikes me a more beautiful ritual, inviting
something precious and impossible to grow, a letting go
the other a gluttony
of memory / A rootless nostalgia that rots
from the way it is loved
I want to believe I am free enough to be
the first kind of person but I know
I would end up digging those teeth out of the garden at night
holding the loose bones close
to my face,
as if they could speak again
(THE BILLBOARD CLAIMS) CAGED TIGERS LIVE LONGER IN LAFAYETTE
though still die and are memorialized
as wooden trailer, sun-lashed plastic
effigy. Below the overpass, alligators play their skins
accordions in mud. The sky opens up
like the descending cumulus tooth
of a hyena, and B and L backseat explain
the rain-patched sun: the devil
is beating his wife. Roadside, the sickly
oracle eye of the snakebird continues
hatching mayflies it can’t tongue away.
//
We stop to see the camel
at the tiger-themed truck stop gnaw
the chain link, and imagine ourselves teenage
girls in that town, shuttling buckets of gray
horse meat through the grate on Friday night
itchy with hope a particular cowlicked boy
might join her. The zygote that falls out of you
in this Louisiana gas-station bathroom
is a non-event; women countenance death
on the regular, bloom and rot a pendulum
in the grave of each our hips. Miscarriage
a freer girl might write and be called
sentimental—a pet name to indulge
the spot where rusted hook atrophies
the slack corner of her lip, pulls taught
a hollowed, sexy grin. You’ve anyway seen
at twelve the backroads coyote hovering
a carcass who believed perhaps it was
its favorite. And perhaps it was.
//
The story of tonight: we spend it
poisoning ourselves in all the fun ways.
N debunks the fallacy of heart
as open window while the half-drugged panther
night lacquers its teeth with zeroes.
In Florida you caught a habit for teasing flames
at bridges; sob later in the dregs
of coastal stoplights. Lafayette, you add a few
more to your vast graveyard of hatchets.
//
Tell B you’ve never been to those parties for boiling
arthropods in piles, but if a pair of reeling black eyes
sought you from a distance you’d pluck the creature
from its mass crypt, make of it companion; in secret,
bite its underbelly and accept whatever’s there.
As in: any steady hand makes you twist, split
for Appalachian nothing-towns to perform
preemptive mourning. As in: what is the difference
between wanting a person and wanting the pain
that furnaces out of you under their cock-
eyed affection, unselves you a crumbling empress.
L says anyone can skin a rabbit clean
using just their hands—make a forked slit,
pull.
//
crimson flower without a moon evicts the wraith from its driftwood fort
anatomy you are good at abandonment as a child I wandered
into a cornfield got lost mites carouseling in my bra welted cut
through to sirens on the other side no I ran
into that toasted mouth surrender my town lurked
breathing heavy stalks the albino owl’s
eyes reflected the floor of a squatter’s backwoods
cabin I never left I never left o that my lungs or any red word
could change me the way this town’s men speak
of wives as trowels and white violets unsnarl from trees to slime
the sidewalk what is it about longing as a permanent state makes a girl
blind horny for burial call me succulent queen in the harem of thirst
feathered eyelid slumbering in hot silk python gut
I wanted horses breathing kinetic in the plaster
I do not want to be another sweetness the bayou shucks open
//
Under hawkshadow, N drives until
the false nests that bauble Floridan trees
light you somatic. Somewhere, a person you could love
is uprooting succulents with the pronged side
of a hammer. Horizon pinking pine
bark, hog ponds, the slow-sinking villages
whose rotting curbs we cruise with starry-eyed glee.
We will someday join the bestiary
of this sallow marshland—lie in the basement
valley, quilted in stringy mushroom, and forget
to rise. The tiger who crawls away to sleep in wombs
of burial will tell his old and lonely dreams
and we will listen, pillared.
Erin Slaughter is editor and co-founder of The Hunger, and the author of I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Split Lip Magazine, New South, Passages North, and elsewhere. Originally from north Texas, she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University. You can find her online at erin-slaughter.com.
Featured Image Credit: Morgaine Baumann
