2/8/2018 Poetry by Emily Blairwine drunk / punch drunk ask me about blood vessels breaking around each veined eye from strain of vomiting until I thought throat might disengage from neck ripped myself, fingerskin, eyelash, clump of hair matted torn from neck nape in too-hot shower two dozen birds enter a box eleven emerge they are the same birds how? sometimes two things are one thing hiding behind one name’s veil look at me and say how sad and funny, dangerous and interesting, fall in love and worry why two dozen? twenty-four sounds harsh what happened to those two other birds? they died sometimes things die like me and also not me like I die and my mirror twin doesn’t like she smiles and I smile and we laugh together and we know it’s so funny, dead birds, with their small bodies pressed to the ground at last like the rest of us it’s a fucking riot fingerskin eyelash eyebrow hair was scab bruise ask me about the joke later and I will not know there’s been so much blood here inside and outside of this one/and body, this existence of want and excess vigil I have killed more men than I can count in more ways than I care to remember in my dreams [not nightmares] I’m me but vigilante against the men who held me between two palms and spit in my mouth I was eleven. I was seventeen. Twenty-two. Should I go on? Tonight in my dreams they come one after another while I’m in the shower, but I swing the metal shampoo rack without a voice that will not appear they look like the men who place soft hands on my lower back while my boyfriend stands only feet away I never scream. In my dreams I don’t need to. I am strong. I tear their bodies apart, blood clogging the shower drain, bathmat steaming with intestines. All this makes me hysterical, violent, a harpy in dark eyeliner, lank haired Medusa, look at me in fear. Don’t look at me, you men I could kill with just these unbruised hands. More men than I can count. More ways than I care to remember. Give me these nightly furies. Allow me revenge. they ask why I cry about middle school when whisky drunk call me ship watcher joking, because we are landlocked and I stare over western ridge with the intensity of a widow on her walk on her roof with one last hope that someone will come home to hold her close and everyone is safe enough silence and people begin to think you cannot hear or see how their disregard I’m a houseplant I’m a wall hanging I’m hanging in there joking for six months after a boy my age told me I’m going to rape you every day for weeks and weeks and I didn’t know what it meant I thought it was violent I knew it was a desperate plea for anyone to know and see and feel his own abuse much later. much later I knew I should forgive him but I didn’t. Eleven, if you’re wondering I was eleven and he was eleven and he told me he would rape me every single day and I was left speechless – throat clogged in case I had asked for it The Observer Effect I drink beer more like our fathers than mothers not slowly reclining down the night so much as full-body immersion my first girlfriend Rhea was an Alcoholic, capitalized, seething, passing blame for all that rent her a dead dad and me both for being immalleable I get a job at a wine store the clientele is old rich traveled once to Italy my first fight with wine at age twenty in Southern Switzerland I puked so violently that blood vessels burst across my eyelids purple blotches staining my face for days (this is only an admission, years removed, a not-at-all-tragic anecdote) Rhea hung her father’s gun above the mantel but had no shells for it she tells me about writing her father’s biography in Greece, where her mentor found Bud heavy for them to split her father’s drink of choice I found that cruel but she loved it I guess that says everything I drink vodka, beer, press against bodies on throbbing dance floors, quiet what asks and asks and I drink beer fall in love with gaps in other people Rhea had no shells for it I drink like our fathers he died in his sixties but who am I to focus light on havoc high-water marks only touched by edges of great pulling tides ![]() Bio: Emily Blair is an Appalachian poet and college instructor living in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her first chapbook of poetry, WE ARE BIRDS, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Her recent work can be found in Boshemia Magazine, Punch Drunk Press, Vagabond City, and Figroot Press, among others. Comments are closed.
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