Carrie Etter
Captive for Lucy Maxwell Scott the dimming light limits my range / of vision, leaves me / in body, body, body / ache of crooked tooth / itch of plaques on my back, hips, elbows / one wire suture in my lower gum, tongue twitching the thread’s metal edge / and the walls, the house rises up, old Victorian stone and plaster, creak and click / the night becomes heavy with / body and / these small noises, these small irritations, this accrual / and when today Lucy, at lunch, spoke of her childhood nightmare / succession of tiny waves rising to chase / she smiled, shook her head, dismissed / while I / in the day’s last light / I number them, I reckon / my socks soaked, the water / rising, rising ** Threshold O, my old loves, come to the house where I’m not waiting. Just drive until you’re dozy, a straight line on the interstate highway, a good run of diners if you need a cup of coffee, my house two left turns after Ruby’s or The Bluebird. I’m inside stroking a calico cat with a pot of black bean chilli slow cooking on the stove. I haven’t seen you in twenty, thirty years, and maybe we wouldn’t survive a conversation about politics, but once you held my cheek or listened when I trembled. Truth, I love you all, and here’s my small ranch house with too many cats and a lot of good beer in the fridge. I’m ready to listen, ready to give you what I’d give myself. ** My America says the expatriate Daughter of Obama. Daughter of Trump. Daughter of a backyard strewn with the rusted shells of automobiles. Daughter with a revisionist memory. The wolf released to cull the deer. The deer. The Book of Revelations. The Song of Solomon. Hooters’ all-you-can-eat wings night. An order for two Diet Cokes, easy ice, at McDonald’s drive thru. The best taco truck in Los Angeles. Free baseball caps bearing brand logos for corn seed, hardware stores, a waste disposal company. Fantasy Football and Fantasy Island. The annual garlic/corn/watermelon/strawberry/pumpkin festival. Pumpkin spice from September through November. White policeman kills unarmed black man. 32 dead, 17 wounded at university shooting. Ranch dressing on the side. A trailer home park on the edge of town. Florida orange juice, Idaho potatoes, California raisins, Wisconsin cheese. The moon landing. Judy Garland. Sesame Street. This store offers rainchecks. Daughter of Malcolm X. Daughter of David Duke. ** Apollo 13 “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” Jack Swigert Jim and Jack and Fred were going to the moon, but boom! one little explosion and there go the oxygen tanks. Who can turn a lunar module into a lifeboat? They can! Yes, it is very cold, and they are so tired and thirsty, and there’s not much air, but the photos of their sweethearts have to be answered. Have you even heard of a carbon dioxide scrubber? When you’re almost a quarter of a million miles away from home, you’ll be glad you have! The moon–O moon!–just had to wait. ** Nightlife We are at the crazy golf in Bath about to play the windmill hole, though, as it’s been sixteen and a half years since I last played crazy golf, the windmill may be as fictitious as the dream it appears in, yet my mother isn’t a fiction, only her aliveness is, and indeed I can vouch for the red cotton top she wears, as it’s one of the three I kept for myself in that long August of sorting her everything and generally bearing either my sisters’ suspicion or disdain for it. Anyway, my passportless American mother, alive at the Bath, England crazy golf and drawing the putter back, pauses to gauge the distance along the passage through the windmill to the hole and its cup of glory. I’m not sure whether my mom studied physics in school, but something in the focus of her gaze makes me think my couch-loving, fleshy mama has, in this new existence, an inner sportswoman, and yes, of course yes, with a graceful swing she lands a hole in one. My mother beams, her ruddy face alight for a long beautiful second before I wake. I don’t believe in the hereafter or Heaven, but tonight I’ll go to bed at the exact same time, wear the same leopard-print pyjamas, and give the same affectionate good night to my unwitting husband, to ensure my resumption of the most delicious game, in which undoubtedly—undoubtedly—the next hole in one will be mine. ** Heroin Song 3 At the wedding, she explained why everyone should forgive her. Ah, heroin, your sinuous logic in my sister’s small head. She arrived sunburnt (sunburnt may be figurative). While her daughter loitered away the time in a nearby town. My sister tells. She wants to tell. There’s no palpable apology I can take between my fingers. And if my fingers itch for it? Her eyes are still the blue of periwinkle. ** The poem was first published at The Poetry Review. ** Carrie Etter’s fifth collection of poetry, Grief’s Alphabet (Seren Books), will be published in April and includes ‘Nightlife.’ Individual poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals internationally. She also published short stories, essays, and reviews, and she is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Bristol. |
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