Bible | Vers
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Haircut in the Kitchen Sink
Couldn’t feel when you nicked
behind my ear, but I know
the moment when you asked me
if it hurt. Some remake scarlet
letter on the tv. Classic as a book
unopened on the table, my hair fell
over the kitchen sink & for once
no man was hollering rapunzel,
screaming let down, let—
Down into the drain. laughing
Different then, I didn’t flinch.
***
Down South, most bothered us
to make a living: we stashed ourselves
in crowded basements, mosquitos
pooled around our feet, we tucked
our xanax back in the church van.
***
In Louisiana, we learned warm baths
salve bites as children first, but then
we saw the trucks that came in bursts
of state-sent chemicals—we knew
we were the same then: you, me, &
the mosquitos. Not sure the moral’s
the state uses drugs to kill off “undesirables”
or that the dampest rooms will always buzz
***
The Loudest if you listen. Listen. Listen—Let
***
Us swear upon the night
we buzzed our skulls
inside the dealer’s kitchen.
How when the men
we stayed with slipped us,
Even then, we dreamed
of More—
Overpass
Perched above the slide, Meg says the cardinal’s her Nana coming back. I’m nine or ten. I scoff impossible, I toss up sacrilegious, I promise that’s insane. Too young to know the symbols, the no-menclature of some traffic signs, but I know this: the Baptists don’t believe in second coming unless it’s Jesus. Her Nana’s not Jesus & I sure won’t be a witch, though next summer the heat tried to burn us both alive: I watched the barn swallows circle the porch fan when I couldn’t sleep, the barn swallows became my father as he left again / got “clean” in Georgia, & I watched too many musicals on the sky blue carpeted floor. I prayed & prayed that even though I failed the promise pledge at Camp Bluebird that summer, that even though I lurched forward in the pew a little late, too late, the only one not standing with the Lord of anti-fags & anti-sex in the pre-pubescent congregation, I prayed that maybe then I’d be an Angel voted most likely to be the anti-christ & they were wrong, I prayed if nothing else I’d become a cardinal or a bluebird perching near the heaven I can’t get in anymore & now I’m tired, tired from the image of
a faggutguttermouth
the built-in infrastructure
of the spit or swallow spit,
the hock one at the passing
car or swallow slur they sent
faggutguttermouth
whose tongue leak no one needs
to see those thighs whose passing
car swerves round us crying
about strapless dress & we should pass
like whose-the-fuck-we-look-like,
man made in thine image, whose
face is pooling in the mud
under a concrete overpass
whose narcis’ puddle trickles
down into this city’s intricate
constructed drainage system
faggutguttermouth
whose fist knocks at my bedroom window whose threatening to post my thigh
high in the air ass on the internet whose threatening to call the cops on the dildo
in the living room whose fist on the glass is a bluebird seeing a bluebird’s reflection
whose trying hard to talk-smack-follow bluebird mirrored feathers couldn’t
shatter the barrier between our mirrored wings
