Go, stranger, and to the Spartans tell that here, obedient to Spartan law we lived our lives and fell.
—Diodorus (my paraphrase)
Chris Howard
What have you done forever
to blow your thoughts backward
through cerebrum and red hair
my thin Catholic girl?
My god there must be something to eat
to make you right again
to strip the absence from your hands
your belly
the lips that whispered to me
you could feel yourself bleeding
in mass
after English third hour
How could you have taken any of it seriously?
Serious enough to poison yourself
with their false humiliations
and fixed game
Letting the bitches
pull me aside at Christmas
to tell me smugly
what you had done
no longer fearing the name
of my thin Catholic girl
I saw it then
should have told you
in your parents’ A-frame attic
under prayer shawls
and green equalizer display
everybody hates themselves like you do
and they hate you more
because
deep inside they always knew
Your absence so full
that my anger is tuning like an orchestra
And I wonder if you would mean
half this much
—your life worth so much more than theirs—
if you could still speak
of the nada of everything
how you push it down
and it's back again
‘our nada who art in nada’
my thin Catholic girl
Spiders circling a candle
on patio table silent alien legs
stitching into Illinois night
the smoke of a clove cigarette burning
pupils distended like an animal's
pupils like whatever
as you said
‘Ready to go?’
Upstairs creaking wooden stairs
watching you ascend spine pelvis
Yes
Ready to empty myself
into your tight bleeding bag
to take my place
among your collection of DNA
alongside the scar collector
and the soft-spoken skinhead
whose mandible
snapped like a shot
when hit with a full Natural Lite
In the A-frame attic
should have told you
tell me the books you've read
bad authors so clever
and you hate them
and vaguely know why
as you paint obscene pictures
of your own body
Tell me of
your new tattoo
black ivy cinched like razor wire
tell me of
your father
who looks too long
when you watch videos
laying on the new carpet
I should have told you
Tell me of
the white flash
as you kneeled in pajamas
a grown woman in a Lincoln Park loft
my thin Catholic girl
alone for a second
in the knowledge
that it all
comes down to
one clot
swimming upwards
through the wrong vein
Wait for me
and it will be
my honor
to submerge with you
and come back again
into the smell of burning houses
to boil
at your side
And between our howls
and shrieks
you can whisper
how much you like music
and my back when I'm sleeping
and how you feel yourself bleeding
in mass
after English third hour
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