All I’ve got left in this empty house

is lukewarm Grey Goose—

and small talk—that prattles about

in my brain—for hours

—everything I said,

everything I did,

—a rapid fire

of crossed wires and neurons.

My brain’s a wormhole of its own conception

I feel numb. But I was the one—

who looked back.

I don’t care.

Anymore.

I can still hear the flame

brazened body language—

translated into verbs and nouns, now—

as I brood and smoke what’s left

and forgotten, too—

of your cheap menthols.

My spine resembled hers, you said

and it disgusted you. We lay there all night, breathing slow breaths of fire

to opposite sides of the room.

Silent.

I don’t care.

Anymore.

Maybe it’s staring craters into fine lines

—as the firing squad descends

and a smile as the first shot rings out—

death’s last call.

Finally.

—Because, what’s anything, if memories are, and will only ever be—

lost projections, set on a timer.

I don’t care.

Anymore.

I’m a derelict kite lost in the flutter,

just restlessly—in search

of some unknown hand

to grab me.

I don’t care,

anymore. But,

I think what burns

halos into my corneas as I refuse to unshut,

is that just maybe:

I do care.

Too much, intense. Too—

real. Too obviously caring.

Still as I sit,

abridged.

I.

I killed a man in a county

whose name I forget—

It started out as mere obsession—something my therapist calls:

religious sublimation.

I was a cheap thrill seeker—

and He was the Denali

on acid. My therapist says—

maybe you should just forget.

—but I’ve already forgotten, and His memory—behind the barrel of His own Smith and Wesson. One hand in my pocket—I laugh as I bring the chamber around

and lock it in place.

I never hesitate,

—my Russian-Red lipstick stained on His cheek.

II.

He washed me away—slow at first, until my psyche was fully eroded—but awake.

I was the other woman—to her.

The woman who knew,

but still—poured a Scotch over neat,

when he came home smelling of sex

and Listerine.

The harlequin who carried

His grandmother’s diamond—

and a serrated Santoku

under the pillow.

—I carved this smile myself.

He created a prison for me to inhabit—

a web I spun into fairy dust.

And I bought it with my sanity.

Yet—I admit

—when it was good,

—it was really good.

But I was so vain.

His power. His wealth—

I was twenty-nine and forest-green

in an arena of fire.

III.

He was another God

I dreamt into existence—

a Fata Morgana on the thirsted lips

of a question.

Two-faced, one cheek to the mirrors edge—

I see myself,

precocious and twenty-something still—

a meadow of crimson clovers

on the dawn of unseasoned-spring.

Other times—blood-shot eyes

and purpled bruises rouged

in bronzer—my neck

between His teeth.

—Maybe the persistence

of memory is mere pestilence to the human psyche—

and I’m sat here pretty

in my own sanctification—

because maybe Jesus—

was just another man.

—crowned by the minds of the sick

and lonely, and maybe we’re all just idealists

—creating wine out of water,

—and dying of thirst

in the process.

Everyone here has a story,

and we discuss it all like old maids

at brunch. I haven’t actually felt the sun

on my skin in fourteen days now. I trace water droplets on foggy window panes as they race towards the bottom to be the first

to die.

My roommates from old money— Boca raised, and coming off another booze-hazed bender. This is her fourth time here

—and still, she uses our bathroom to vomit

dinner—no mind who cares. I watch

thick clouds turn into old silent films,

a tapestry of sky under a backlight

of moonlight. I miss the bloom

of my mother’s favorite—

Japanese Magnolia—alone,

outside the window of my childhood bedroom. It’s violet-blush—violent, against the rest of the winter-dead landscape. I’m five hundred miles away— getting drunk on old cartoons—liquid tv afternoons,

and I think:

I’m getting down with this disease—now.

I eat my Cheerios pre-portioned, from a Styrofoam bowl—raspy to alert

everyone when I take a bite

—with full-fat milk.

I try not to think about the physical action, spoon-to-mouth-thirty-two-times, before I’m allowed to stop—

I think about that fat-bellied iguana

I saw out the bay windows yesterday—when everyone else had visitors—

and I sat alone,

with focused gaze—

a full admirer of his strut across the plush

St. Augustine. He wasn’t even aware

he owned a body.

The nurse wakes the almost dead

first—every morning at five

with a courtesy-hard knock,

and demand: Vitals in five!

I join the rest of the herd who linger —strange ghosts in wait.

We line up, unnamed cattle—ready.

To be weighed and prodded

and pushed down the conveyor belt

of health,

—with buckets of chalk-tar Ensure to cushion the landing.

Fattened like pigs ready for slaughter

—I’m allowed outside, but tears are rolling down the window panes again, and the suns still missing.

My white hospital gown billows—

off-the-rack

and totally—

Sane.

I’m gone.

I.

Every Sunday when the sun started to bud

its head through the canopy of dead—speckled dogwoods, coffee-tongued

and morning medicated, she’d peel

back the dust covered fallboard

on her time-stained Bechstein,

like she was lifting the lid

off Pandora’s jar.

II.

Her fleshy skeletal instruments—

just bound bone in flickered white eggshell bounded off, across the rosewood soundboard. The glass-latticed sunroom where I watched, and she rarely ever spoke—quivered with a gusto as she warmed up

her nimble fingers. In her criticisms—

she was Monsieur Croche.

She would grab my hands and place them on the bare-polished mahogany and say: Close your eyes.

Feel the music, first.

Then you can play.

Behind paneled gold-floral,

with eyes shut wide.

She became Claude Debussy

in his third movement of Suite Bergamasque. Each note shivered my skull—as tiny-felt covered hammers

inside the belly,

struck steel strings.

III.

A player piano sits in its place now—

alone.

The capriccios and concertos

that once throbbed

throughout this house

are all lost with their host,

to the hollow harmonics

of frozen clocks,

still tolling.

Dancing on the hardwood feeling good,

I snap my fingers. Listen.

At a horse track in Hot Springs my father bet all his life savings on a palomino Quarter Horse named Diamonds Sparkle.

When my grandfather peppered

his seed across the alluvial floodplain,

cotton cropped up like a southern snow

in September. My grandmother’s hand-stitched quilts lopped like gongs on the washing line. Blighted youth, blackspot

on roses, butterfly milkweed, I murmur

as I tumble ass-backwards—headlong,

my blithe youth behind me. I’ve come this far, barefoot and mean, out of the backwoods of the Mississippi Delta. Dipped in Southern drawl and mud-stained fervor—

a water splintered levee—it doesn’t ask why first. It has a rhythm to it,

a gentle pulsing—

like my grandmother’s spider-veined hands

in the biscuit dough. Her food, thickened

all her toothpick-limbed children,

and my grandfather, mellow like smooth corn whiskey. Under a setting sun,

his bourbon-boozed breath

came in small spurts.

Most folks talk too much,

he’d say, aiming chewing tobacco

into an old coke can.

He never murmured.

Sometimes he’d look

out across at the tar-tinged night

and talk nonsense with the invisible choir

of cicadas.

My innocence clucks

like a chicken hauled off to the chopping block. Goodbye fruit flies cruising

the heirlooms. Goodbye pecan pie

and homemade vanilla bean.

Goodbye my cover of coots that grandmother fattened every morning with slivers of leftovers.

Where the word holler was both

a verb and a place—where ramshackle

little mud huts were made.

Some words are rickety doors creaking

open, and I walk on— through another lost summer,

a red-stained road

never coming

to an end. The cicadas still sing.

One of these days,

I’ll be gone.