Erica Minton

HIGH AND LOW
For Ben, Melissa and Jonah Compton

I hunt for your lost thing.
This is what I do when things go missing:
I upturn. I capsize. I make lists
of where I have looked, have not looked,
am afraid to look. I can copy these lists
for you, if it would be helpful.

Your loss is, infinitesimally, our loss.
Such is the way with shared hearts—
just as we bum helium when yours is high,
so too do we nip a bit of this ache.
Anyone with anything worth keeping
feels their voice catch in their throat,
holds their miracles a little tighter.

I, we, hunt for your miracle, in my heart 
and in yours. Even side by side,
one can easily tell our hearts apart:
yours dwarfs mine, a result of expanding
to house both a family and the trampoline
that keeps them up, up, up. Now we hunt;
not for a thing, but for a way to live
around a thing— one you’d glimpsed,
cleared room for, will continue to love
after every stone is upturned, righted again.

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.

FLORA

When a woman is growing, lovely,
you are tempted to cut down
the taller trees that snatch at the sun.

You are tempted to whisk her away
to your waxy glass hothouse,
where it is always warm
and a door keeps the rabbits out.

You can’t, though.

For a woman to take your breath away—
and you want her to, you all do—
she has to grow through her gnarls.
She must love her thorns, somehow.

And when the sun slinks from behind a cloud
she must bend, and hurt, and stretch,
and want it more than she thought she could.

But wait— she will be the impossible flower
that sprouts legs and walks out of shadow.
She does not need you, and can love you
beautifully.

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?

SHEL

I stole your skin while you slept.
I crept into your room and filched it
from the chair where you flung it,
to groom it by morning.
As the fragile dawning light broke
I washed your husk with care, expunged
the rough musk of wood smoke and dirt
with a gentle detergent and a used toothbrush.
I scrubbed the sweat from your brow
and the old thorns from your sides,
tugged the weight from your shoulders.
I rubbed the stubborn ink from your
newshungry fingertips, took acetone
to the note that you wrote on your hand
(don’t forget to call Sean).
I buffed a small hickey from your neck
and a smudge of blood from your knee.
I pinned your shoulders
to a clothesline, wrestled
some wrinkles from your forehead,
and let you swing free
until your toes stopped dripping
and your skin was cool as Klondike.
I skillfully redrew your freckles,
spent an hour on the diaspora
across the bridge of your nose
and the constellations tattooing your chest.
I pressed the rest of the pleats
from squeezing the sheets in your sleep
and reapplied your lashes, nails, moles,
touched up mulish places on your face.
I folded your flesh like a flag, stole
back into the room where it belonged,
hoping it wouldn’t be long
before it smelled of me again.

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.