Found in Willow Springs 75
Back to Author Profile
Phone Call to Plan Abortion, as Flood
She says she's lost so much weight
since our breakup that she can see it,
she can feel her hips spreading out
as though her womb were a river
and the water was rising around
a lump of clay caught in its path.
She can't keep from crying. She tries,
knowing how hard it is for me to hear
her pain, but her levies are broke and gone:
waterlogged-teddy-bear gone,
family-photo-album gone, gone
as the christening gown blown
into a tree two towns away, gone. She says
in Texas, now, they make you listen
to the heartbeat. They take your ultrasound
and show it to you and make you hear
the twice-quickened rhythm against
the backdrop of yourself. She says
what hurts most is that it's a piece
of me she's losing, the last piece, and if
there was any part of me that wanted
to pull from the wreckage this family,
I should do something. I should do
something, but I can't. If you need
any help, I say, let me know. If you need
any, any help, anything at all, I'm here.
I am so artful in my evil, it takes
three of me to keep myself
from running back into the house
and lying down on the linoleum
to wait for her to swallow me alive.
Okay, she says. Okay. It's like searching
for bodies. Out there, somewhere,
the ragged corpse of goodbye
is waiting for us to find it, but instead
we stay on the line, petrified
that when we hang up it will be the last time
we'll ever hear each other breathe.
Suspect
Now I remember how the policeman
asked me where I was
at the time of your death, and I thought
how nice of him to try
to cheer me up, joking that way
as the waves in his shoulder radio
crashed and whispered.
And then I listened to the frequency
of his lips and there wasn't a quiver,
not a single crest in the flatline
of his face and I knew he was seriously asking
whether I had killed my girlfriend.
lf l had been a smarter man, a man
whose grip on the exposed wiring
of shock had not been so tight,
I would've seen it coming.
I would've inhaled and swallowed
the rotten, sulfuric taste of the entire
administrative holocaust to come,
papers exchanging hands
in distant offices, workers flitting
through the safety of their honeycomb
with their dirty feelers scraping our names,
and folders, finally, eating us whole.
"Why?" I asked instead,
knowing why, but wanting
to hear him say why. "We're just trying
to get all our ducks in a row," he said. "We
only want to understand."
Oh, officer, I never knew his name
but what a gift he was.
There was only so much understanding
to go around, and he wanted to drink
every drop of it, he wanted
to pound nails through the feet
of those ducks and drown them. "Home,"
I kept saying. Home, home, home.
He seemed to believe me,
which was funny because I knew
you were on the loose out there, fresh
as a cyclone crossing a prairie,
hovering, splitting and replicating, and
wherever I went or whatever I told him,
home had run away, dissolved, the way a word can,
the way a person can, the way facts and dates
and places end up blaming us, stupid us,
the ones who took the trouble to make them.
