Erica Minton

Republic #8

How lovely this feels, October sighing through our window,
plaintive music playing, the two of us quietly pretending
that ten minutes ago a bullet had not whipped by our heads.
My Riesling is still warming in the car, forgotten.

I am less frightened than embarrassed. A gunshot
doesn’t kink my stomach the way it did two years ago;
already I act as though I had not just racked my brain
for the last words I might have said to my baby brother—

                                                                        —he, by the way,
an enlisted man, and not yet shot at (praise be). I live on Republic
out of pride, eager to be part of something brave, a borrowed courage
I’ve mopped up like gravy. Mom tells anyone who will listen
that she is in awe of her daughter’s backbone.

But I doubt she would recognize my heart, if she looked.
Last December, in the alley behind our bedroom, a white light pulsed.
I remember stooping to the window, searching for the squad cars.
—Christmas lights. Blinking. Washing Republic in light, then dark, then light.

PRELUDE
For Meredith and Eric

We were married at that moment.
Rings would come later; cake, champagne,
later. In our binding moment, the mile-long aisle
between us, we wore the selves we’d worn
that first morning, our tongues warm tweed in our mouths.
We were married at that moment; radiating
promises too delicate to hand out like party favors.
The true vows hung to dry on the line between us,
dangling and dripping, sunlit wool. All else
was show. You and I wed in the prelude, kissed
and danced as the rest caught up.

HE SAYS

he can be
my muse

from another
room. 

OCTOBER

                  hisses open like Black Cat,
The Best That You Can Get.
This is the first year that it hasn’t meant—
hasn’t meant. It can simply be October,
primed to be pasted over with the photos
we took accidentally, dropping  
the camera. The weight of the shadow
was a lot for me, but you trusted me
in September. Let’s share this cold milk
moon. Let’s empty the trunk of the car
like we’ve meant to; let’s drive to that harp-
shaped bridge. November will pop
like a cork— I can hear it now.

MINTON

My surname is Minton, but before Ellis Island
it was longer and full of quick-lipped consonants
(I assume). Probably Scandanavian tongues
warbled it for years, called it out over boxes
of newspapered fish— but when I ask my father
about my heritage, he declares us “American
as corn.” We share Minton, one who came to the village
by way of mountain, though I will never know the mountain
or the village or the fish. My mouth, my name,
my round-boned frame came from Ohio and no farther,
to hear my father tell it, and I was given no muscle
memory, no strong nose or olive-baked tan to suggest
otherwise. But I can be simply the mountain, a crag
in a cornfield: unlikely, but for that reason
something to see.   

SCHWARTZ POINT

It’s clear that we’re propped up in someone’s living room.
Double Bass flips through sheet music filed in the piano.
Each musician wears black, but I can’t tell if they meant to.

They begin, familiar within themselves but otherwise strange.
No one throws a title. Clearly there are words to this song—
Clarinet knows them, mouths them. Billy Collins would know them.
I wag. These notes must have steeped in me before.

Trombone swallows his slide, unswallows it. He crosses
his eyes as though the tune were stitched on the bridge
of his nose. Sax produces his baritone, warns us Marmaduke’s
about to bark! and means it, hoarses his dog. Drums brushes
his high-hat like he’s on a dig, like there are old bones beneath that brass.

The night is one song with pauses to breathe, to beat
leftover rhythm from the old rugs tacked up on every wall. Piano,
the codger whose living room we’ve heel-toed into, shares
the mic with his instrument— pivots it, half-sing half-string,
in homage now to Count Basie, now to his own swinging moods.

There are ten people in this room and seven are in the Society
Jazz Orchestra. The seven hep yeah man when Piano insists If I never
have a penny, I’ll be rich as ol’ Jack Benny. Sax sweeps fox-eyes
toward my mother and I wonder if he’ll write a song for her.

The night’s single track wraps up in what feels to be the middle.
When Trombone relaxes his squint, when Trumpet un-puckers,
I realize I would not know them on the street— unless there was a
beat.  

BIKEWIFE

Wear your goddamn helmet, Daniel.
Do as you like with the knuckles of your spine
which rap on the sky let me in.

Scatter your wrists and your hips across pavement
as if there were a yard sale going on.

Hurdle your handlebars skull-first,
eyes pried to glimpse a wide earth
the way the meteorites see it: hard and ready,
all tough love, offers of surface.

Only wear your goddamn helmet.
I have three years locked up between those ears,
and a right to half of what you’ve stowed there.
Crack all of your strong parts and rip the soft ones.
Bring the head home and the rest is forgiven.

NORTHERN MICHIGAN

Trucks survive here without brake lights,

without back seats. Towns, bars, children
are named for lighthouses. Lighthouses
are named for French men
and their furs.

                         That first northern night
we each dream of our grandfathers
because it’s been so long since we’ve seen
anything so strong, bridges built
in the 50s by men who shared chins
and haircuts. Surely something
my grandfather built still stands.

And we’d never realized we led lace-
curtain lives until we asked for
Universalist churches, Irish pubs,
chai tea. The roadsides teem with homes
for sale, but everyone who can endure
is already roosting. Besides, we are too
long from our desks, we are too coddled
and warm. Nothing we build stays built.
None of our grandfathers taught us
their knots, left us their hands.

MARCH

The world
swollen like a bee sting

and then spring

The world
swollen like a bee sting,
wet to the waist, frost-wrung

and then spring

The world
sting-swollen,
wet to the waist, frosted,
raw-nosed, thaw-rotten

and then spring

The world
swollen and wet,
frosty, hostile
and gray-lidded

and then spring

The world
swollen and moldy,
hostile and mildewed,
slush-tongued, moth-soft,
worn and lukewarm, winter
until the tea runs out

and then spring
from the heel
forward