Tuesday Oct 8th at the Tartan Inn...

Emily Dickinson Sanitary Napkin

...is a fan (for all you female poets out there) of the Emily Dickinson sanitary napkin...they are slender and pale with an autumnal scent of Amherst coating the interior lush of your loins and you will never need to leave the contours of your writing desk (or yer home) ever again...hell, people won't even discern you are wearing one until YEARS after yer unsuspecting and romantically reclusive de...mise....so for the modern feminine poet who cannot possibly stop for the excessive grammatical dash of death and whose heart is already bleeding over some priest's cavalier civility, manacle a box supply of Emily Dickinson sanitary napkins to your writing desk for the next 30-40 years because, (after all, ahem) "After a great pain, a formal feeling comes...."

peace

       

 

 

PEACE

 

It was the payphone at the

Abandoned gas station;

The payphone stationed

In a vertical blue manger,

The crooked payphone

Whose chrome slit

 only accepted

Quarters, the same phone where

A week earlier, hung over from my

Late night labor day fete,

the prostitute

With thick stropped boots

Whose angular chin and sloping gait

Reminded me somehow of

 Hester Prynn stomped up

And solicited told me that if I’d give her a

Twenty dollar bill she’d give me a

Blowjob and thinking, in that moment

That perhaps I could somehow save her

I emptied my wallet and asked only

That she give me a hug

Rushing back later that day, my

Pantry emptied in a cardboard box

My confirmation bible

Saluted beneath the pit of my arm

I found only the slender

slope of the payphone

coiling from it’s

Receiver, the tail a fresh suicide

Casting a downtrodden

Shadow in the opposite

Direction of the saffron-raked

sun.

The dial-tone, still

Emitting a warbled devotion

Informing me that I was somehow

too late.

 

 

It was the same payphone a week

Later

The day when the sleek coated

Macadam plummeted

From the hard nickel of heaven

Stitching a metallic nest

parched rubble cratered protein

I held the cyperoptic conch

In my hand like the fetus we lost

Gouged out the numerical bleeps

Knowing that your husband

Would probably answer that phone

Which, of course he did

And I asked for you

 

That moment I cupped

The dove swoop of your tongue

In my ear

Tilted into my shoulder.

I didn’t have to identify myself.

I told you what I should have told you long ago

Then I asked for forgiveness

 

In that moment

My baby, my darling girl

I swear,

You were cradled in the girth avenues

of your own husbands arms

Accompanied by the Dim lit aquatic

glower of the television

Closeups of befuddled

newscasters in loose ties

In that momentary shuffle

In that atomic hush

When you didn’t know what to say

So you said nothing

Some how then

We found peace           

We found it

Alone

After all this time

There was somehow peace         

Somehow we found it,

 

still.

 

--for Megan Kristin