Cortney Bledsoe

Hawk

A hawk diving for a sparrow diving

for a wren. A glint of sunlight on white.

Darkness worried by the sun, red-stained

teeth shouldn’t shine in polite company;

they’re never clean even after repeated

trips to the dentist or that guy by the Dumpsters

back behind Safeway. I liked you better when

you were fat and easy. Never forget: man

is an animal but who will change his diapers

when he’s brought indoors? Or will he stay

outside? The taste of wetness, the smell

of pink on young skin. None of this compares

to warm feet, quiet Sunday mornings on hawk

-feathered pillows. The chains hardly chaff

with the proper ointments applied. Sears is both

a palette and a way of life. The lonely literalist

of the heart tastes blood when he runs, but it’s

always his own. His white shirt, starched stiff,

glows in the morning light. No one asks to see

what’s underneath.

***

Elegy for the Dryer

Mom taught me to clean a lint trap, that time,

was it even six months after Dad bought

the brand new dryer that it caught fire and burned

because she didn’t know you were supposed

to clean the lint trap out. “I thought it was self-cleaning,

like the oven,” she said. This was after the disease

had taken her taste buds so she lived on onions

and pickles, taken her memories so she wrote everything

she could remember in quick lines, taken her sense

of self and left her with a nervous twitch and terrified

eyes, but really; can everything be blamed on bad

wiring? We found her wedding dress after the funeral,

the stitch-work on the lace jumped and fell like the dial

of a seismograph. “Can you believe she was a home-ec major?”

My sister said. I’d had no idea. But let’s not pretend

our past matters more than it does. So many anecdotes pale

in the light of shining eyes when you realize you’re simply

revealing the shame of the little boy who can’t keep up,

tumbling down the hill behind his mother, who’s running

to outpace what can’t be escaped. So you clean

the lint trap, make notes, yourself, but walk slow

when the hills are steep because grass stains don’t come out.

***

Drill

The trepannist smells the oil beneath

the grass when we see nothing but

green. He can hear the pulse of the clouds

sheltering us from the supposedly searing

heat let in through their burr-holes. His

thinking is magic; he tastes the dead in

every bread loaf. The demons can’t escape

without a path; when God closes a door,

a window must be opened or else the house

will explode from the pressure. Likewise,

the heavy stone of madness must be

extracted lest it weigh one down. But what’s

to be done with the stone once removed?

Once it’s out, he doesn’t care. He’s concerned

with the unimpeded flow of blood from inside

to outside, the exchange of divine radio signals.

It’s not for us to understand the skull-less

thinking of an uncovered brain, the soft places

in his thought patterns, the openings that allow

what we cannot imagine: it’s for us to abide.

***

Children of the Mail

We were born with No Postage Required tattooed on our backs, and we wonder why we’re forever sending ourselves away. We stink of ink; our skin is rough as yellowed paper as it ages. Our tongues taste glue, no matter what we use to wash it away. We are forever hearing the postman’s footsteps while we try to get on with our red work. Each tooth, a quarter. Each quarter, a curse. There are gods in distant cities passing over each of our children with fingertips stained with the blood of the newborn. They’ve wandered onto pedestals because they could make no miracles of their own. They smell like cigarettes and granola, crunchy failure and stale ambition. They are legion, and we would all trade 5 a.m. for their workload. We scribble out loaves and fishes, raise the dead as offering.

They say:

We’re sorry.

We’re sorry.

Try again, later.

We say:

Amen.

***

Cathedrals of the Useless

We didn’t know how to dance, didn’t know smiles were for more than showing our immaculately cared-for teeth, so we swayed awkwardly, grimacing at the walls which refused to acknowledge our manners. We didn’t know what mattered, so we catalogued minutiae, built cathedrals of the useless and called ourselves avant. We conferred degrees on the most pedantic among us and fought bitter disagreements over the proper spellings of the janitors’ names, which we never remembered when we met them in the halls. We had paper cuts on our tongues from trying to taste genius. Our noses bled ink. Sometimes, in the alleys between the marbled halls we’d built with our parents’ money, we saw dirty, paint-smeared things, swaying in time to their spray cans as they applied the slightest dash of color. Our security force would wait until the paint dried before locking them in the highest towers where everything below looked like something we couldn’t define.

*** 

Blues for Clooney

You got fat and I got fat but you

still get work. We can’t all afford

a monkey, but that’s what makes

you George. The other kids closed

their fists when they speculated

I might be gay. I wasn’t and you

weren’t and they were but who

cares? You got old and you got

political and your movies are just

as boring as my life, now. See?

We’re the same. No villas for me

but that’s okay: my monkey

doesn’t have to wear diapers.

***

It Isn’t Ice Cream

Einstein crying in the park as his ice cream

melts on the sidewalk; he knows too much

to ever be happy. Me, breath bated with chicken

liver, I’m going to catch me a turtle. But only

armadillos can walk on water, and Einstein’s

never been to Arkansas. Delilah, I can’t talk

to you when you listen with your mouth.

Words are not thoughts though they appear

just as fleeting. Don’t tell me about your lactose

intolerance when I’m trying to share my

philosophy; I can smell it in your teeth.

I’ve had enough vanilla ice cream hours;

let’s make chocolate days. Better yet, moose

tracks. All that bench sitting only serves

to collect splinters in my ass. Delilah, let’s talk:

the red womb of your discontent cannot hold you

indefinitely. At some point, your water’s

going to break, and who’s going to clean

that up? I’ll love you until it melts if you share

your waffle cone. That’s all I ask.

***

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