Marty McConnell
The Admiral
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 pas I 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 pas in 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 Journal and others. Her first full-length collection, wine for a shotgun, was published in 2012 by EM Press.