{"id":3065,"date":"2022-01-19T10:53:33","date_gmt":"2022-01-19T18:53:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=3065"},"modified":"2024-12-17T09:11:22","modified_gmt":"2024-12-17T17:11:22","slug":"two-poems-by-colin-pope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/two-poems-by-colin-pope\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Poems by Colin Pope"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Willow<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Found in\u00a0Willow Springs 75<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to Author Profile<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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Two Poems by Colin Pope<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Phone Call to Plan Abortion, as Flood<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She says she’s lost so much weight<\/p>\n\n\n\n

since our breakup that she can see it,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

she can feel her hips spreading out<\/p>\n\n\n\n

as though her womb were a river<\/p>\n\n\n\n

and the water was rising around<\/p>\n\n\n\n

a lump of clay caught in its path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She can’t keep from crying. She tries,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

knowing how hard it is for me to hear<\/p>\n\n\n\n

her pain, but her levies are broke and gone:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

waterlogged-teddy-bear gone,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

family-photo-album gone, gone<\/p>\n\n\n\n

as the christening gown blown<\/p>\n\n\n\n

into a tree two towns away, gone. She says<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

in Texas, now, they make you listen<\/p>\n\n\n\n

to the heartbeat. They take your ultrasound<\/p>\n\n\n\n

and show it to you and make you hear<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the twice-quickened rhythm against<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the backdrop of yourself. She says<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

what hurts most is that it’s a piece<\/p>\n\n\n\n

of me she’s losing, the last piece, and if<\/p>\n\n\n\n

there was any part of me that wanted<\/p>\n\n\n\n

to pull from the wreckage this family,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I should do something. I should do<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

something, but I can’t. If you need<\/p>\n\n\n\n

any help, I say, let me know. If you need<\/p>\n\n\n\n

any, any help, anything at all, I’m here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am so artful in my evil, it takes<\/p>\n\n\n\n

three of me to keep myself<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

from running back into the house<\/p>\n\n\n\n

and lying down on the linoleum<\/p>\n\n\n\n

to wait for her to swallow me alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Okay, she says. Okay. It’s like searching<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

for bodies. Out there, somewhere,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the ragged corpse of goodbye<\/p>\n\n\n\n

is waiting for us to find it, but instead<\/p>\n\n\n\n

we stay on the line, petrified<\/p>\n\n\n\n

that when we hang up it will be the last time<\/p>\n\n\n\n

we’ll ever hear each other breathe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suspect<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now I remember how the policeman<\/p>\n\n\n\n

asked me where I was<\/p>\n\n\n\n

at the time of your death, and I thought<\/p>\n\n\n\n

how nice of him to try<\/p>\n\n\n\n

to cheer me up,  joking that way<\/p>\n\n\n\n

as the waves in his shoulder radio<\/p>\n\n\n\n

crashed and whispered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then I listened to the frequency<\/p>\n\n\n\n

of his lips and there wasn’t a quiver,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

not a single crest in the flatline<\/p>\n\n\n\n

of his face and I knew he was seriously asking<\/p>\n\n\n\n

whether I had killed my girlfriend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

lf l had been a smarter man, a man<\/p>\n\n\n\n

whose grip on the exposed wiring<\/p>\n\n\n\n

of shock had not been so tight,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would’ve seen it coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would’ve inhaled and swallowed<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the rotten, sulfuric taste of the entire<\/p>\n\n\n\n

administrative holocaust to come,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

papers exchanging hands<\/p>\n\n\n\n

in distant offices, workers flitting<\/p>\n\n\n\n

through the safety of their honeycomb<\/p>\n\n\n\n

with their dirty feelers scraping our names,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

and folders, finally, eating us whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Why?” I asked instead,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

knowing why, but wanting<\/p>\n\n\n\n

to hear him say why. “We’re just trying<\/p>\n\n\n\n

to get all our ducks in a row,” he said. “We<\/p>\n\n\n\n

only want to understand.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, officer, I never knew his name<\/p>\n\n\n\n

but what a gift he was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was only so much understanding<\/p>\n\n\n\n

to go around, and he wanted to drink<\/p>\n\n\n\n

every drop of it, he wanted<\/p>\n\n\n\n

to pound nails through the feet<\/p>\n\n\n\n

of those ducks and drown them. “Home,”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I kept saying. Home, home, home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He seemed to believe me,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

which was funny because I knew<\/p>\n\n\n\n

you were on the loose out there, fresh<\/p>\n\n\n\n

as a cyclone crossing a prairie,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

hovering, splitting and replicating, and<\/p>\n\n\n\n

wherever I went or whatever I told him,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

home had run away, dissolved, the way a word can,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the way a person can, the way facts and dates<\/p>\n\n\n\n

and places end up blaming us, stupid us,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the ones who took the trouble to make them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":25234,"featured_media":572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3065"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25234"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3065"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37930,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3065\/revisions\/37930"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}