Poetry by Monica Monk

     George Bremer CC




Early Morning Sober Zoom to Britain from the Beach Cabin


Last night the Sun’s wind howled in the aurora borealis.
Gravity couldn’t even hold the Sun’s corona, thousands of degrees hot

and hurling particles against our magnetic field. On Earth, I am a long 
body under warm wool. A long barge in front of a tug 

pushing heaps of shadow. A yellow triangle of navigation lights pushing 
dawn. At 4 a.m., my Why must be strong as the magnetizing rush

of a solar storm. An electric blanket thrown on a violet
blackout sky. Throw everything at sobriety 

until it sticks, they say. Outside, on Vashon, fog sticks to the tree line, sinking
in until all the trees have teeth, until the distant urban port ceases shining

its lights viciously into Commencement Bay, swallowed in gray -- from miles 
away, cannot cast vicious shadows on my cabin wall 

of the self I can’t unsee. I’ll never unsee now what I know about alcohol.
For my friends, it’s noon; for me, dark. Our faces all glow in Zoom’s aureole.

​




275 Days after I Rent the Beach Cabin


Nights before bed, I ink my star chart
with black felt marker.
Beach walks mark my days. This morning,
I miss the moment an eagle eases off the beach.
At neap tide, the beach hardly has room
for her & me. Neap tide
arrives at the quarter moon.
For three quarters of a year now, black stars line up
in a fixed constellation of sobriety.
The eagle fixes one raptorial eye on me.
Transfixed, a shivering limb is sewn 
to her talons, sewing green cedar to gray sky
with her huge body—like sashiko, a visible mend. 
I marvel at how she shows the strength of the mend 
without hiding the need, like ink on a scar.

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​There’s No Secrets in the Women’s Room


I know both women crowded around the sink at the writers’ conference and the third voice 
from the stall sounds like Lois’, unembodied and angelic. Your coffee mug is still in here,

at which Anne says There’s no secrets in the women’s room. I think, true grace is to divulge, 
unasked, the location and contents of your one precious space. I wonder if

there can be secrets at a writers’ conference? Two minutes after I arrived, I told a woman, 
a stranger, that I’d stopped drinking, the second, Sarah from Utah, that I forgot my underwear

which bummed me out until I thought of washing my one, red merino pair
in the shower and hanging them to dry at the window overnight

and to be safe, I texted my women friends, who suggested the obvious--
turning them inside out, buying new ones, going commando. Who’d know?--

but each night finds me, naked Ophelia in orange plastic sandals, scrubbing shampoo 
into my knickers in the public shower. You’re only as sick as your secrets, they say. Here’s one:

before my brother died at forty, a childhood classmate wrote a bestseller.  
Then he wrote another. I bought the book, a comical buddy story, 

about a character with the same disease that killed my brother. I read the first few pages,
then I drank a lot and wrote him angry messages, apologized, and quit drinking, in that order, 

and I’m not asking you to pass judgement here, but instead, to listen to this story 
about how when we were kids, my brother would sometimes crumple 

to the ground and couldn’t get up, so my parents taught me to help him
by hauling on his back belt loop. You had to circle your arms around his waist to hoist him 

to an upside-down V. Effortfully, he’d put his hands on his knees to push himself 
up and I’d need to help him the rest of the way, lifting him by the shoulders 

to a straight-up position and then retrieve his stocking cap from where the bus stop boys 
had thrown it. Yes, at the conference, there was Bestseller Guy. I wanted to hide

in a drowsy women’s lounge like the one at Frederick’s and Nelson’s 
in the early seventies. My mother and I would pass the old women who chatted 

in matched skirt suits on couches bookended by ficus under frosted windows, a capacious space 
with just a skiff of Fourth Avenue traffic, coo of nesting pigeons and Chanel No. 5.

In menopause, my space for keeping secrets seems to be shrinking. 
Bestseller Guy was everywhere, especially the salad bar, and when I found myself alone with him

pumping ketchup at the condiments, I had to speak, and you know, what do you say, 
haven’t seen you since 1986, looking good, sorry about that again, but condiments are the wrong setting

and in high school they said I was too nice, anyway, so instead I tell him I forgot my underwear
but it’s OK because they’re wool and I can wash them in the shower. I love this underwear.

It’s Canadian. The pair I happened to be wearing the day I left and, of course, am wearing 
now is cranberry red, and you might see the top of them over my jeans if I’m not cautious.

Now I know a lot about you, he laughs, and I laugh and say Yes, maybe too much 
but wonder if I will need to read his novels now to look for the red herring.




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Monica Monk is a poet residing in Washington State. She has had her review of Kathryn Nuernberger's Rue published in Flyover Country Literary Magazine. She is currently a student in the English Master of Arts Program in Professional and Creative Writing at Central Washington University.