Erica Minton

HESPERUS

She sloughs off words like a wet dog. Some cling despite her.

She is every side of a die. She was made to be thrown.

Her eyes are kaleidoscopes for her heart.
Her heart is a kaleidoscope for her mouth.
Her mouth is the end of everything.

She lives for the middles of stories, sheds the rest like crust.

She is a woman on her worst days, a girl on her best,
and a tornado when she cannot find her footing.

She rips like a bored blade.
The scars she leaves are signature, ragged like earthquake Arabic.

She is strong the way rocks are strong:
given the choice, they might be something other.

She fights off words like a wild dog. Some cling to spite her.
Her mouth is the end of everything.

THE FIT
For Johanna and Paul on their wedding day

Some things want desperately to be.
There are locks that struggle to unfasten,
doors that fuss and shuffle on their hinges,
objects brimming over with potential energy
that yearn to roll or churn or careen.
Time tries to be any time but this one—
five minutes ago, ten years from now,
an instant that never truly happened
or an old moment you just barely remember.

And there are things that want to be together.
This transcends magnetism, fields of nature
jerking and twisting until balances strike.
This pull is something higher, primal, hair-raising.
It is how birds find their nests again.
It is how you know a voice you haven’t heard
in eight years, as if your ear was waiting for it.
It is how you find your own mouth in the dark,
or how smoke makes its way to the ceiling.

Physics often works in our favor:
nudging things closer and buffeting them around
until they stick, or click, or mix, or meld.
Science catalyzes, then moves out of the way.
We are already antsy to snap into place,
tumbling roughly inside ourselves until we do.
The rest is easier: our natures finally mollified,
the din in our souls trailing off like a distant bell.
The rest is a life together, frantic with new purpose.

OVERCAST

The weather promised storms. She waited,
magazine in hand but eyes turned upwards,
tracking shifts in light and cloud. Of course
the news was wrong, of course the streets
were dry, her ankles, elbows, dry. Itch.
She twisted in her clothes. Her jacket
breathed without her, close and snug.
She shrugged it off to bare the wriggling
skin beneath. Her insides wanted out, joints
edging for space. She owed her body something,
owed it rain, owed it mad dashes, owed it
a frenzy. The clouds would make her wait.

LATCH

The gate was a compromise.
If it were up to me there’d be no doors
on this house, no windows—
I’d be dumped in through the chimney
and left to fortify. I would learn
how to make adobe and pack
the cracks in the walls. You insisted
a gate could be more than a weakness—
let me test the heft of the iron bars,
watched me kill an hour picking
the padlock with a hairpin, as in
the movies. I know the toothsome
key that dangles from your neck.
I finger its divots on your chest.
The gate was a compromise. I am yours
to lock in, out.

This poem was inspired by a photograph of Tony D’s. I hope he doesn’t mind.

DOLL

Flea-marketing, I found myself
as a rag doll. Dark hair, snarky
smile, over-stuffed thighs. I brought her
home and dressed her in my clothes.
I sewed my wedding ring to her finger,
set her in the bed with a book
in her lap. I slunk out the window
with bus fare and my makeup bag.

I came home one year later
in the sewer-colored night, pouring
myself through the same window
I’d escaped from. The rag doll
was still in bed, book thrown aside,
dreamless and wide-eyed.

He didn’t move when I replaced the doll
in bed, and I pulled him close
to tell him his honey was home.
Then I settled in, amazed
at what one little year can do.
A year can take you to Texas
and back, it can make you miss
poker night and the Jack-and-Coke
on his breath. A year will make
your lips fuller and your hair longer.
A year can even change a man,
can make him stop snoring, and can
leave him with hair as soft as yarn.

WITNESS WAITING

This is how I knew
that it was love:
that he did not move
her hair from her ear
but spoke through it,
letting whichever four
words he chose shiver
through stray strands
and into her scalp;
and he knew, somehow,
to hover his palm over
the small of her back.
Did he have any idea
that this slight divot
at the base of her spine
was sacred enough
to draw blush and blood
as I bit my lip, waiting
for him to make contact?

MEME

Somewhere over Tennessee, there is a bird carrying a memory
in her beak. A hiker, underestimating a precipice, has fallen, dashing
his head against the stone. Appalachian scavengers
are scrabbling through brush, making off with the best parts of him.

The bird has chosen an old memory, and one of little interest.
She was one of the last to arrive after the fall, all weddings
and birthday parties long gone, each delicate sadness spoken for.

Left to pick through the old and the stale, she burrowed
and came away with a long-buried afternoon: a midwest snow day,
everything muffled, plumes of smoke rising from chimneys.
It is a small, sweet memory, and it will feed her homebody babies.

Before men heavily guarded their dead, these meals were common;
foxes could grow fat on a diet of thoughts that died unspoken.
These days death is veiled, whispered. Synapses die with bodies,

fizzled in the skull, denied new life in the bellies of baby birds.

ELIJAH

I always keep an open space.
There is a place set at my table,
a spare room with the best bed.
I have enough food for a small army.

There is space set aside for you
near me, or in my arms, or in the corner
of my eye. I keep blessings ready.
I write goose eggs in my checkbook,

I hold a place for you in long lines,
and I make more tea than I can drink.
There are doubles of things, spares.
I cannot use this much detergent.

You could fit inside my zeroes.
Someone else considers you, factors
you in to her weekly shopping list.
You are using her forks, sleeping

in her second-best bed. She has arms,
a checkbook, detergent. Her space
isn’t extra, doesn’t gape in waiting for you.
You are her furniture, not the ghost

that just might walk back in.

IMAGE

By June she was showing up everywhere—
on the margins of TV Guides, on receipts
from his table-for-one dinners, on glossy
pink invoices for motor oil. He sketched her
on the fly, this imagined woman with fried egg
breasts and eyes as round as skillets.

Now
that he is gone I chase her through the house,
rubbing away what I can and leaving tiny vixen
ghosts in my wake. I pray while I rip and erase—
not for him, not for us, but simply praying
that I was not the inspiration behind her hips.