Three Poems

we accidentally schedule couples counseling during the apocalypse

I miss Doc’s first question when Mr. Abrams’ garage explodes into an acre of purple stars. Brimstone, then looting. Clockwork. In your corner of the computer, you spit exhaustion out the side of your mouth, carry auburn hair past expertly rolled eyes. Outside, the air is on fire and, this is the worst part, I’m forced to admit I haven’t been keeping up on my emotional journaling. Doc isn’t pleased but I have more pressing concerns such as these heavy beams of light carving up the neighbor’s topiaries or the sky, now black as that baby grand we bought for our forgotten child. Doc asks about medication right when the sound cuts out. But I can still hear the seas boiling. I can hear the mountains crack, destroying that small Lebanese restaurant where we had our first date and you ordered fattoush salad with smoky prawns. How your pinked lips turned north like a crescent moon when I spilled the bottle of Chateau Musar. How your finger grazed mine, my ribcage lighting up like hot coal. Like a flushed cheek. Like my desperate fury at an absent God.

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my god requires i perform annual feats of strength

One year my God piled mason jars brimming with unresolved trauma on my back until spine tore rice paper skin. He once encouraged me to re-enact the final conversations with my mother, smell all that fresh guilt baked into her room’s cracked yellow paint, feel each syllable dig into my pink flesh like a railroad spike. And at his request I have torn out my own heart, held it in my palm, felt its own smaller heart beat like the breath of a child. I wonder what burdensome labors have been planned for this year? My muscles are leaking and the soft part of my brain that regulates emotion has started to turn an earthy brown. Maybe God will simply request a quiet night at home. I can cook his favorite meal, recite the whole of Deuteronomy from memory. He can reach inside my thigh, pluck at my femoral artery like an upright bass.

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i’ve been told i resemble a haunted pencil

The way my fingertips scrape along the page, nails tearing dry pulp, forging pain atom-by-atom. How when I stand at attention my skin gives off a glow like a ghost’s dress, blinding in its veracity. Or the sound my brain makes when it moans, like rails bending beneath a far off train. Chipped skin cursed, belly full of condemned lead. The doctor said a demon excavated my bones. Dripped his sour breath through vein and fiber, whispered sweet nothings through the holes in the chambers of my heart. Still, what a pleasure it is to have someone, some thing, inside me. To be able to reach deep inside and grasp that warm leaking fist. I’m told my brother had a demon inside him as well. Remember how that ended? Door locked, room full of all that bloody tile.