Every bomber is a suicide bomber. I walked into the strip club set to detonate. This morning my hair smelled like smoke, though the laws
in this city insist on separation of booze, cigarettes, and exposed vaginas. The word no has never left my vocabulary, so what do I know
about taking off my clothes. By the time the woman hauled her puckered implants to my table to declare herself 100% gay, the second boy
who blew up the marathon had bled out on the boat or been arrested. I stopped listening to the radio at cornered. I stopped apologizing
for not wanting a lap dance after the fourth naked offer. When the world’s on fire, everybody finds their own way to the water. Nobody
was smoking and the juice was mostly ice. The manicured pubes of the ladies on stage humping the laminate with practiced
indifference had all the sex appeal of street signs or furniture assembly manuals. I expected a room
packed with wolves, slavering and grabbish. I walked into a fishbowl of dead-faced men
paying cash money to be lied to poorly. I left the radio on in the car, the voices of reporters
filling the interior with second- hand blood, wounds head to toe, I did not check my phone. If any of those women had offered
to kiss me I would have taken out my tongue, the thing I sell
to stay alive, left it on the stage next to the singles and the fog machine, somebody’s discarded
juice glass, calling the name tattooed across one’s lower back, Serenity– serenity. Whatever
fluorescent god we can pay to grant it or rent it. Holy water is made by the passing over
of sanctified hands. Melted ice at the bottom of a glass, a young killer’s blood on a boat, no saints
in this country, not in this century or this room, neither the cops nor the boy nor the bomb nor me
and the woman tucking my torn out tongue in her garter like a dollar, like a blessing,
like the end of the fairy tale, the newscast, the amen, the amen, the end.
landscape with distant horn section
In your absence I boiled the eggs out of their shells. In your absence grabbed the hot pan handle, lightly burning the hand still six days
from touching you. In this city without mountains or you, the wind’s my best measure of distance -- today it barely stirs, even here three flights up where you do not live
and the second egg is getting cold. A dead woman sings in French, ne me quitte pas. Yesterday on the radio a woman mentioned my age in an ad for supplements against the horrors
of menopause, When was the last time you felt right in your body? and I drove all night into that voice. I felt the eggs in my torso thinning to shadows, I drank with strangers
and exaggerated my faults, ne me quitte pas il faut oublier tout peut s'oublier qui s'enfuit deja The wind throws over the note on my windowsill, your absence hangs in me, a rumpled
cotton dress, unironed, the favorite, the tea as always watching the sky through the trees, brown edging up the long string, ne me quitte pas on a vu souvent, rejaillir le feu de l'ancien volcan
qu'on croyait trop vieux ne me quitte pas ne me quitte pasI know there is no easy forever. I’ve kissed the forehead of a woman in death’s clear reach, I walk around this house
leaving trails of hair, markers by which you could find me or know I was here ne me quitte pas Everything is becoming an altar ne me quitte pas in your absence, as my body abandons finally
the glitter of adolescence and Catholicism ne me quitte pasin favor of a now magic, everything hewing to itself in a yogic kitchen ecstasy ne me quitte pas, the teakettle and fire
making their own whistling wind, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Instead a story about the body: a week after my grandfather died, his assistant
hanged herself in the basement that was their office. They were so close to discovering a cure for arthritis but she couldn’t do it
without him. In the version I know, my grandmother found her but did not cut her down. Her dress belted and pressed, shoes still, remarkably, on.
-- Marty McConnell lives in Chicago, Illinois where she works for a youth and family center. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and her work has recently appeared in A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry; City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry; Gulf Coast; Indiana Review; Crab Orchard; Salt Hill Review; Beloit Poetry Journaland others. Her first full-length collection, wine for a shotgun, was published in 2012 by EM Press.