Two Poems
Zac Cahill Smoke Figures I know there’s an ashtray around here somewhere but I also know that cigarettes are tired of always hanging out with each other so I let them die in the grass, spread out to look at the clouds that hide the stars – Dare me to try and get one to the moon? Ever imagined smoking in outer space? Using the moon for your ashtray? Me neither. After my mother’s second divorce and roughly sixtieth heartbreak she said that the world was all brand new but only if she stood on the back doorstep and squinted real hard and the smoke from her Marlboro floated into her eyelashes just so. My father beat himself so badly with the bones of the elephant he found in the backyard he couldn’t see out of his left eye for almost a month. Those days his Bud can became his ice pack instead of his oxygen mask or the cast on his hand or the blunt force in the back of my head or in my gut winding me. I yield! I yield! My brother screamed at the 7-11 lady after she said that yeah sure she was fine but she wished her son didn’t always seem so numb; all he does is check his watch and complain about being colorblind. My favorite place to chain smoke until I have to go inside to vomit is a hallway except its outdoors and honest to god I don’t know another way to describe it than that. My phone is dead so I guess I’ll have to sing what I want to hear even though these bricks are giving mixed reviews. My mother called it hospital, my father called it looney bin. I called it place to get some damn sleep and talk to Molly, the dementia praecox, 17, glowing purple and dancing with her hands straight up in the air – she forgot my name each day by lunch, but always remembered that she absolutely positively fucking loathed sweet potatoes. A man I loved once talked about getting I hate it tattooed inside his mouth and I said Honey-boy go for it but he only laughed and kissed me right near my armpit where he was lying starting to sing something not nearly sad enough. My father returned from the bar called Porcupine, sank into the carpet like it was satin in some coffin; woke to find his elephant bones confiscated, my mother sipping her coffee in that sickly purple bathrobe, at peace for the first morning since the pseudo-mastodon decayed out back. I piss out 72 ounces of Pabst and I flush the cigarettes with it but keep the lighter for the candle an ex-girlfriend gave me after we made out in her grandfather’s garage, just us and that band saw who refused to close his eyes no matter how hard we begged. Letter to the Traumatically Beautiful Would I love you this way if you could last, if you weren’t born only to be pronounced dead within a matter of moments? Here and away, a flare of light seen from the backseat where the kids hold hands in secret while one of the parents drive and smile trying to remember any moment so peaceful. Never everlasting. What gives you the right to decide when to appear? When they’re reading something they love aloud, dancing until their socked feet are as drunk as their mouths, eventually collapsing in the great rapturous unknown that is new soft carpet, christened with spilled wine and that Herbert poem about arriving in heaven. Though why not pretend it is wet concrete so that one can try to write what the other’s hair tastes like in it? Later will come the analysis and you’ll be nowhere to be found. And then there’s those bruised memories we almost beg you to create, clinging to them for the tainted euphoria inherent in the pain. A fishhook through the ear. A father cutting out his son’s splinters by lamplight, kissing the tiny toes after each twist of the buck knife. Staying up all night in the empty bathtub simply because she knows it’ll hurt her neck the next morning and that means something to her. 11 years old and drunk in the cemetery, carried to the car after vomiting – odd funeral, but the moon was so big, so bright the adults all swore Sheena had something to do with it. The boot in brother’s belly, sister’s black eye from that gold wedding band, the rowboat in the kitchen that mother put there, protesting the injustice. These moments do you make holy. You’re not always kind, though, after you’ve had your moment. The girl who was paralyzed after being thrown from the bed of her boyfriend’s pickup wouldn’t stop talking about how beautiful the air was – every shade of green – before her neck hit a branch and her legs stopped. I’ve been known to break apart and dissolve at the right pair of eyes, deep blue or warm brown or ice, just for glancing up and catching mine as if they’d been waiting. You’ve somehow created a perverse beauty in blood. Mottled purple crimson in the eyes after asphyxiation, a safety-pin drawing it from ribs in ribbons, a couple drops off the cheek in the mirror. Are you ever lonely? You’ve never burnt your finger lighting a candle, only been the moment of looking at the pools of wax and seeing miles of muted yellow shoreline. You’ve never been the hands of the child gutting a fish, only been the galaxy of gilly goop and scales, swirling on the mud under the picnic table, the whole universe waiting to be stepped on by some aunt or uncle. You’ve never smudged your glasses, only been the smile after he goes to clean them, wondering which part of her face altered his prescription just so. I have this habit of skipping halfway through a poem I’m reading. I miss you before you’re gone, am in pain as you return. |
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About the Author: Zac Cahill writes mostly from Alma College in Michigan, where he is currently a student. His work has appeared in Pine River Anthology and West Texas Literary Review.