Poetry by Josie Peterson

Lee Coursey CC




Wifey Materials
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“I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely, 

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.”
- Adrienne Rich, “Natural Resources” 


        1.     Recreation
Phytochromes see red and make something good. 
I pour                       
                                                                                                                                                                              blood & hope   

for the best. “It’s okay if I do this, right?” say the flicking fingers in my back 
pocket, hot with hot garlic breath. What if the answer was no?
But I                                                         say yes—because he’s mostly benign,
because, well, you have to fuck 
with a poem until it gets good.     You know, remodel, budget

cut, slice a few salaries, give out a promotion or two, 
rest on                                                     the seventh day. On my lunch break 
                                                                    I peer down at the collars and spread cream cheese. Oh, no, but words
                                                 are      
                                                                    slipping 

through my hand -                              oh no, not words, but 

the knife -  

I laugh at first at the blood spurting from the (borderline malignant) neck,
but survivor's guilt enters me, transforms 
                                                                                      my head 
                                                                                     (her head) 
                                                                                      to bits

                 at Seward Park, a thin body                                     (mine, broad), translucent legs 

                                                            (mine, orange), curly hair (mine, 
                                                                         cut), just two (one) 

                                                                   girlish frames laid bare. 

                                                                   Earlier, my boss had said: “An ad campaign is like going to war. 
                                                                   How are we going to take over all of this?”

        2.     Spirit, or Fire
[Out to the tree stump, before me 
and before the millennium (I wonder what they all were
wearing?), my dad drug my mom, bent her
over his knee and struck palm to bottom, in front
of my brother.                                        I was busy inside
the snake coiling                                   between the garden fence. Anyway, what do you make

(Perhaps he wore rough blue 
Levi’s bought at the Country Store, she a pilling
gray skirt handed down by a sister-in-law, my brother blue 
staticky basketball shorts too long and past 
his knees?) 

                                                                      of this distance between you (I mean all of you, not proverbially) 



                                                                                                                                                                       and I?]  

       3.     Substance
A jogger found us and the methed-out rich kid passed out drowning in our blood, who knew
all along he’d stay in my company, eat dinner off mahogany, tell jokes: remember when you 
shot her 
stripped her 
clothes drug her
sludging the (body) 
to the grass 
your body back to the car, 
passing out thinking
the bloody footprints 
weren’t real? 
And we all laugh. 
Jesus almost spits 
out his wine. 
I always knew that death

is not the evil thing. In fact, I only hate 
dying when you tell me how to do it.

       4.     Solutions 
                                                                 Do it, please, tell me they can fly back 
                                                                 into me, the long-lost fluid
                                                                 words, my breasts permitting only I to hold them:
                                                                 lifelong creative pursuits, proverbial 
                                                                 milks, the breaking down of things, 
                                                                 the barn swallows up the rafters— 
                                                                 or must the sap of forgiveness always stick 
                                                                 to and weigh down the empty folds
                                                                 of my pockets, the babbling brook on Christmas

                                                                  Eve, a teenage Boy,

                                                                  large-pupiled tears leaking 
                                                                  from my Brother? 

          5.      Atmosphere
                    I have never rafted such a stream, but I sit beside the shore, and the rainbows tell me 
                    where the words are. Meanwhile, Mom reels. His back dries the riverbed and sizzles 
                    as she sautees filets on a hot rock. While she cooks, I ball up the end of her favorite
                    scarf (old, brown, stringy, spaghetti-like, but soft) in my waistband and pretend 

                                                                                                                                                                          to be a cat 

                                                                                                                                                                          basking in the hot 

                                                                                                                                                                           pink sky.  

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Josie Peterson grew up in Northwest Montana, the place that gave her voice. She currently lives in Utah and hopes to attend graduate school soon. She has a black cat named Walter, named after the famous TV anti-hero as well as the American poet.



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