Thirst
To drink hard liquor here means glass, no ice
as it would water down the drink and cheat
a man his feeling. Study the amber, fire
become liquid and ready to make a man speak
if needed. But rarely. Bars here use smoke
and low light like decorations. No need to see
anything but the exits and the glass
in front of you, not even your hand circling.
Better to feel like you don’t have a body.
Better to look down in the well of its echo
to listen for your name in its surface. No telling
anyone apart there. When the drink is gone,
there’s another until closing. No matter how hard
you hold the glass, it never breaks open.
Taking Place
Clean out the attic to guard against fire
like when they waited for the planes to arrive
in the war after the war to end all wars. The cradle
belongs in the living room as decoration or a bed for a doll
made of cloth and buttons and yarn tucked in a quilt
as the man comes closer, pew by pew, to kill
any child that cries.
You have kept receipts past the required amount of time.
You’ll never use those negatives in their sleeves.
The people in the photographs are gone so long their names
are wearing off the stones. Go through the boxes, art
children brought home over the years
from school, too rough to frame and hang, too sweet
to throw away, hands and stick figures and one letter per page.
The schools are torn down if there’s gunfire there and replaced
with gardens where people pray. Even if no one listens to the news,
the child still hears things at school
and wets herself as if she’s little again.
Administration robocalled two threats in as many days.
Sundays, she draws on scraps of paper through another sermon
about generosity. Even before this stewardship campaign,
the minister preached on how the church doesn’t have the funds
to do the things he wants, the things they need.
He doesn’t speak of shots fired on the corner across the way,
three times in less than a year, each earlier in the day.
He calls the church grounds prime real estate. He doesn’t speak
of the church where the latest attack took place.
It has already announced what it will do: tear itself down
and put a garden in its place. The man who built the cradle
smoothed the wood by hand with mineral oil
and sandpaper as fine as he could find
so it would be silk to the child’s hands.
The woman who pieced the quilt from her mother’s scraps
thought of the child as if in a dream
shared on a wall before it caught fire or fell.
