Exit

One morning I woke up and you were gone 
but I didn’t know it yet. Someone was cutting
you down while someone else filmed a video of it
that they posted on the internet. I was eating breakfast 
with my kids. I wasn’t thinking of you.
Even then you would have called me stupid, 
called this poem stupid, called me smelly slut.

In the stillness of quarantine, I cut ties with the night. 
I spent a lot of time thinking of you, turning you 
around and around, man on a string spinning
in a void. Man who chose his own exit,
who opened a door and left. On the other side
of the door, what? Old junky time. Old eyes in a pile. 
The friend who went through a year before you, 
gunshot blanking his face. When you are gone
you remind me of my old dead grandfather, 
lost in the woods, huffing exhaust from a hose.

The meanest and truest thing I said to you 
was you would kill yourself or someone else.
I said it. That was before you threatened to kill me. 
This is the last poem I’ll write for you, hanging man, 
spindle drop, dirt clod, moldering specimen,
lacing guitar strings together to form a lasso, 
gathering cocaine into a bouquet to shove 
into your nose, fucking and angry. Your anger 
like a fast storm on the bay, coming to get you,

then me. A do-si-do into the grave. A false step. 
A promenade. When you dipped me, I felt
bones in my hair. I felt the absence space of death 
ring my ears. I felt the glowering allure of someone 
who hates me. Inside me, a wrong woman
drawn to the dark, stinking of pussy, naked, 
flawed-up, big-toothed and screeching, breasts 
sweaty and flapping. I hate her. I love her.

I pick her up as I put you down, lower,
down into your grave. She hoists the first shovel. 
When I found out you were gone, I threw up.
I sobbed. I imagined the twitch of your foot,
the sharp twang of your neck, the way your fingers 
stiffened. I imagined night, coming
for you with her dark hood, with her cape of galaxies, 
with her low voice rumbling, Ok, Ok, give me a minute, 
with her chin full of stubble. I imagined that she
lay below your feet, a force to pull and swallow,
a way to be still. A stillness. I imagined a stillness.

I imagined the night, a single cricket’s trill.
A shadow that took you. That held your hand 
and helped you down. Watch your step. This way. 
That took you over the bay, so there was stillness. 
Stillness and the night, humid and bug riddled,
but cooling, the dew condensing on the grass below. 
Stillness, halting your body’s droopy sway.

Read more from Issue 21.1.