I Unhooked the Month of February from Life Support
3am
Marriage, I
Marriage, II
My Therapist Ask Me How It felt
Wife Lore (with Dialog Actor in Parentheticals) [PDF link]
Beach [PDF link]
Senior Prom, 1993
Summer, II
There Is So Much Wealth in Waking
I Unhooked the Month of February from Life Support
It was anarchy that welcomed you.
Second trimester blue.
My mother-in-law’s lonely hallway bathroom.
You, a tiny falcon tolling your bell inside the hospice of my body.
You chewed off your bewit and unspooled my shock.
I remember telling myself:
it’s ok,
it’s ok,
it’s ok.
I am drunk on the busyness of stars. The steps to the kitchen are whole grapes in the mouth of an infant. Outside, the mile-a minute vine slows down its infinity. Darkness pushes a chair with my body. The palms of my eyes feel for every surface. The animal of morning wakes because I interfere in all of this.
There are no bell towers here only
the lazy animal of our indifference.
The genesis of our nakedness slips into the room.
Through the window
the sun is a trumpet of migraining optimism.
I wait for a good memory to come
like an erratic fog
lifting the heavy work of our life.
The dripping behind the walls knitting its sweater of water. Someone in a shower is life. You laugh a candle to burn out the dark star careening its way home to my village heart. Your sugar is muted by the taste of attention's poison. The hours, a doorbell unanswered. Outside, the stole of air smells of wet leaves and far away smoke. Fresh snow blankets the nesting void of grass exposed. I flip the light on, hear the sudden snap of electricity shift its delicate smile.
My Therapist Asked Me How It Felt
The feeling was still.
I felt it near the window.
It was gray.
A schoolmaster of endless
fields. An endless wake of hills.
Our bodies sewing themselves
in and out of a childhood
which felt like rain that would never come.
The sky. Dark.
Ink.
Someone dipped their finger into it
and touched it to our tongues.
That was forbidden and
that was before I was old enough
to know what pumpernickel bread and
shoe leather smelled like.
The rain that never came,
somehow it went on.
It beat against the windows
of our childhood,
all night long.
All night long,
the never-arriving rain
pounded against the windows.
We must never forget.
The rain never hit the windows.
I elbow love out of the way.
Restless waiting on ordinary days.
Days span weeks like wobbly wheels on a shopping cart.
I cry after my pap smear.
A coloring book flowers in the living room.
It wilts in bright pink. It's been months
since I've looked up at the stars.
The ocean, a lee into darkness.
A hat is also a passenger.
The terror of this tide is that I keep going back to its violence.
I view the back of my eyes to remove my brain from light.
The effect is precise and far-reaching.
There Is So Much Wealth in Waking
Rain pricks the fog to prove obstacles exist.
The opposite of a blueprint: facts about chaos.
Dreams bludgeon the night from my sleep.
I smudge my face with time's alabaster void.
I ransack the graves of my few childhood homes.
I search for nothing important.
I am the lock that swallowed the key.
Everyone enters the blister pack of a medicated sunrise.
A flower lives for a little while
while on fire, the fake moon appears
prettier than the real moon.
Chrissy Stegman is a poet/writer from Baltimore, Maryland. Recent work has appeared in: Rejection Letters, Gone Lawn, Gargoyle Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Stone Circle Review, Fictive Dream, Inkfish, The Voidspace, The Madrigal, 5 Minutes, Libre, and BULL. She is a BOTN and Pushcart Prize nominee.
