Poetry By Annmarie Lockhart

Alanon
 
I dreamed of frozen coffee
and the way a life can fit
inside a shoebox at its
beginning and its end.
 
I dreamed of foreign tongues
touched to icy straws
and the sad space between
what might have been and what is.
 
I dreamed of Midwestern food
passing weakly for Italian
and the tails of alligators 
swimming in rivers of beer.
 
I dreamed I wouldn't wake
to your hardened hearing
and the spider-veined face
to match your cirrhotic liver.
 
I dreamed I would one day sleep again.
 
 
​

At 50, Revisiting One’s Attempted Rape at 18
 

1. Believe this is happening
2. Beat on his chest, though your hands are small and he is a champion wrestler and he is too high to feel it anyway
3. Don’t wonder what he means by “I’ve fucked uglier girls than you” until long after it’s over
4. Scream and curse; let your voice do what your hands can’t
5. After he leaves, unfinished and unrepentant, huddle with your roommate, shake, but do not cry
6. Call your mother
7. Observe, and remember, that the gut never lies
8. Listen to the police tell you about the law
9. Listen to the police ask you about penetration
10. Blush with shame for failing to consummate the crime
11. Tell everyone you’re fine
12. Tell the nice boy with the same name that you didn’t say it was him
13. Don’t throw up when the RA reads you his apology, in which he calls you a dumb bitch
14. Don’t you dare throw up when the RA tells you about the knife you didn’t know he had
15. Walk into your first college class 
16. Write off your first college semester
17. Listen when your roommate tells you about the hearing you weren’t invited to, at which it was learned that his records were destroyed and he is free to go elsewhere, free to try again
18. Listen when your roommate tells you about the up-campus senior she is dating 
19. Listen when your roommate tells you about the gun he held to her head
20. Flee, marry, divorce, flee, marry, separate, deliver daughters into the world
21. Pray that Mary intercedes on your behalf
22. Read until you’re able to write again (this will take two decades)
23. Starve yourself
24. Recognize your story in a tv news report one night while cooking for children
25. Learn to say “assault”
26. Gorge yourself
27. Google his name; feel halfway vindicated upon discovering he never won another championship
28. Wonder if he’s done it again
29. Wonder if you’ll ever understand appetite
30. Intercede on your own behalf
31. Breathe
32. Write

 
 

Side Show
 
A human soul is not to be trifled with. It may inhabit the body of a Chinaman, 
a Turk, an Arab, or a Hottentot--it is still an immortal spirit!—PT Barnum
 
Disfigured shadows take the
tickets and hawk cotton candy,
popcorn, sno-cones,
try-your-luck games,
and the main event,
the freak show.
Step right up!
Come and see
            would it be considered
            slander, libel, or fantasy
            if I named him here?
the champ,
the wrestler,
the big man
crazed from cutting weight,
high and pumped and armed
with an athletic scholarship
and a blade.
 
His words, blurry and close:
I’ve fucked uglier girls than you
as the big top topples.
            today: a home repair business and
            a petty arrest record, a $408 fine
            for obstruction of justice
 
The champ was just a chump
seedy, seamy, and low rent
like the rest of the circus
whose ticket prices are
way too high and will
never be refunded.
 



Forget-me-not
 
the fireworks lit up the backstory,
the landscape, a game of skill,
the moon was afraid, peering over the
hills with meticulous concern
for the frame of the night, the hinge
upon which he cycled, as did she,
stuck in her struggle to free
herself from locked combat,
slowly drawing her fingers
over the permanent tooth marks,
across the arch of her foot,
her bandages taped to soak
up the fluids she lost,
the poisons that accumulated
after the last night he’d showed
her again how much he loved her

Bio: Annmarie Lockhart is the founding editor of vox poetica, an online literary salon dedicated to poetry, and Unbound Content, an independent poetry press. A lifelong resident of Englewood, New Jersey, she lives, writes, and works two miles from the hospital where she was born. You can read her words at fine journals online and in print.

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