Poetry by Casey Reiland

      Tim Vrtiska CC





​The Fire

Sometimes, I still taste
                the sibilance of smoke between my teeth,

                                                                                                            still remember all those instances
                                                                                                                          of my mother instructing my sister
                                                                                               to say her fs, my mother pressing her
                                               index finger to my sister’s incisors, hissing,

                 and I still wish there was a word for small
                                                                                                             disintegrations

                                                                                                                                                 of everything once
                                                                                                                                                           held true--

                       
                              the waning of the moon while looking right at it--

                                                                                                                        because the night I slept in ash,
  
I woke and stumbled to your room,
                    and said, I think my room is on fire or                Something is wrong,

                                                                                                                                  and while you ran,
                                                                                                                               like how a father is supposed to,
                                                                                                                                             my sleep-addled brain
                                                                                                                                                             repeated,
                                                    Sumbling, like my baby sister
                                                                    would say,
                                                                                   my father sumbling my singed clothes

                           onto the wet pavement
                                      outside,
                                                                              no, no, Fffumbling, my mother
                                                                                               would correct, He is fumbling,

                                                                                            
         and do you recall when you asked 
              my mother to stop
                                because you thought
                                          the impediment was sweet,
                                                                                                        should be preserved like a specimen in oil,

                                                 so when my sister’s s’s formed into fs, you must have understood
                                                                what was lost,
                              all those soft threads, like that night of the fire, 

the first night you criticized me like an adult--Why are you just standing there?--
         and I understand now it was because fear was a stampede of a hundred horses, 
                                            but still, it was the last moment I saw my childhood room
                                                                                                                                        as my room, my body
                                       
                                       curving supine on my sister’s bed, the clarity
                                                 of life’s evanescence,
                                                                            how quickly the things we love
                                                                                                dissolve at our feet,

                     bright as the crimson dress meeting rain,
                                                     the silken flame dying out into fog,
                                                                                       specter invisible,

                                                                      all those disintegrations
                                                                                                                         unpinning the tip
                                                                                                of my tongue from my
                                                                                                            slick enamel.

​




Release

I’ve puked twice in public. The one story is too embarrassing to divulge. At college parties, nobody cared if you were loosey goosey in the basement, the cramped walls reverberating a dance or a fight out of your limbs, as long as you didn’t start crying. That meant I waited to sob in the rain on the way home. My lover likes to say that we have “big feelings.” Some days, I wish I would have met him in college and other days, I think he would have found me annoying. But for every irritable thing I’ve done, there’s a story about me making a fucked-up decision that everyone relishes. Like how my friend and I got so drunk one night, we projectile vomited outside a pizza place. That same weekend, while walking through Friendship, we stumbled upon two people making out on a lawn, the quiet ensnaring their own world of mouths and hands. Before I moved back home, I couldn’t remember the warmth of the city the night I puked or how we returned to our apartment because the alcohol erased everything to sand, but later, I would recall sitting in the Uber and thinking, Geez, why did I hold it in for so long? My parents took a picture of me in front of that apartment while I secretly coddled a hangover, and my God, I was beaming as though the lights just clicked off and someone whispered, You’re beautiful.







“And They Were Roommates” 
                                                                             After @mattsukkar’s Vine
                                                         For NM and KS, Arlington, VA 2019

On the day I move into the apartment, I tell Nat I want to be a better sock mom. What I mean is, I want to stop losing what can be easily knotted together. Katie’s grandparents came to visit recently, and they were the oldest people in our neighborhood by a good forty years. The monuments dapple white across the river. Everything here is so mirrored, glossy as the flesh of a grape, that I could eat all these expensive clothing stores and bougie gyms whole. I don’t have to tell Nat and Katie this because they already know. We call our apartment complex Courthouse Frathouse, named after the fraternity brothers and sorority sisters who gallop around the pool with bottles of Grey Goose. We mock these people, but we also fall in love with them. Katie admits she went on a date with someone who has a Catcher in the Rye tattoo. An auditor who makes more money than I will ever see in my lifetime breaks my heart when he announces he’s moving to California. Always, Nat cooks for us: creamy curry, al dente pasta with caramelized onions, bread that puffs little clouds when broken. The salt ceases the heartaches momentarily. Nothing is easy, but we search for the moments that are. On Sundays, we play bingo at the Irish pub, and Nat talks about the irritating nature of Holden Caulfield, and I attempt to explain that he isn’t a fuckboy. On Fridays, we watch movies and Katie dances in the living room. A candle pulls shadows on the blinds. If a body catch a body. If I lock myself out of the apartment, one of them throws down my keys. If it is raining, the window is always open. 

​



Casey Reiland’s work has appeared in Autofocus, HAD, trampset, On the Seawall, and elsewhere. She is a recent graduate from the University of Wyoming's MFA program. She resides in Somerville, MA, and you can find more of her work at caseyreiland.com.