Poetry by Emily Blair

wine 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.

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