JUNALUSKA

This is a poem about how you never get the kiss you want when you want it; how time twines around your neck, its thorns digging into your skin so you can never forget how clinging to a string of hope, threading it between your spine, and having it unravel before you in the span of an hour is worse than any metaphor about nakedness that you poets will ever write. This is my reflection in the mirror. This stanza is the small gap where my fingers try to touch against the glass. You can’t even possess yourself; let alone the person you see standing before you. The moon hasn’t come back from the cleaners yet and I have nothing to slip into tonight that makes my reflection feel beautiful. Time is falling through the hole in my pocket. January is coming soon, and I have a feeling that he’s never going to fall out of love with this December. He’ll still write her love letters. He’ll send her white orchids on every lonely holiday and pretend that love is a place you can cross state lines to get back to, but it’s that time of the year again, and calendar sales keep reminding us all that we can never get back to where we once wanted so bad to lose ourselves in for good.

It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.

Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. Don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don’t lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.