Lloyd Wallace
There’s a river in my head
where the dead still wash
their feet and drown
their least beautiful children.
Night approaches
like a tilted glass
of pavement juice,
of rigid oils.
My body is a flute
dead people play.
Sometimes, I cough up hands
into my roommate’s sink.
I call that memory.
When I walk barefoot
in a soupy locker room
and the dead enter
my body through
the bottoms of my feet.
Night is here
like a wet companion,
like the one friend
you can’t kill.
There’s a river in my head
I tried to wade through,
once. But the
night stopped me.
And the night has many hands.
Poem
We watch as ravens climb the rain.
The rain that falls like broken fingers
into the armpits of the sea. Laura,
I didn’t mean to kill your father
at your bachelorette party. I didn’t
know he was allergic to time. When
I told him that it was October, that
summer was over, that the air’d grow
textured, any day now, with winter’s argyle
frost, I didn’t know it would kill him.
Now God is playing with his body.
God has your father in a cage.
I’m sorry, Laura. It’s December, now.
All around us, the hours are hardening
into beautiful, terrible statues. Yes,
and the ravens keep climbing the rain.
Saturday
A muskrat-colored sky.
Thunder. Like someone struck a match
against a frozen waterfall.
I heard a story once about a man
who stole a baby from a hospital.
He replaced it with a block of ice.
The parents kept on feeding it—
coo-cooing it, and kissing it—
until it melted in their arms.
The sound of rain. All over the city,
the wind is re-uniting with itself.
The people stand like iron stakes
holding their shadows down.
January
The world’s still made of weeks.
And I’m still looking for a place
to set my body down. The moon
sneezes light across my windshield,
I come home to find a mutant dingo
eating dinner with my wife, and
I don’t complain. This, also,
is what the living do. The living
scrape the daylight from their eyes
so the dead can see through them
again—or so I tell myself.
Why do I stay alive? Ham salad,
mostly. The feeling I get, on
special occasions, when I sneak
one of my dog’s anti-anxiety pills.
Sometimes, when I close my eyes,
and I don’t have anyone to talk to
but the darkness, I understand more better
why I am the way I am. The years
are little, sleepy teardrops
running down God’s unshaved cheeks—
and it’s my job to collect them. So
I lick them up. I drink them,
and am thankful.
I don’t ask why He’s crying.