16

12 Feb 2023

I imagined my spine pulled clean like a tilapia,

Slick and sliding out, white scraping past my muscles,

Leaving a spineless sack of want.

The first pull came with the headline’s cry,

“Just the last of California’s cherries died”,

And I turned to the window to see our tree disappeared,

And the cherry juice in my greißbrei had flickered clear.

I sighed and poured it down the sink with duty.

The following pull came like a hangdog tide

Which sprawled across my week like love or labour,

Weakening the legs that dragged me through the day.

I’d pledged to play a piece for the local soirée

But the piano keys stiffened beneath my stiffer hands.

The trees, they said, were felled from the sky

Next, to smoke our old men’s whiskey

And make their telegram writing-paper

And the faux fur coat I wore to their funerals

When a back door was left enough ajar.

The fourth pull was my lover’s hand,

Tracing my vertebrae like the beads of a sea spray,

“You’re as hollow as a reed” she murmured

And I laughed until my ribs splintered against my lungs,

A reed plant, did she mean, or a reed to play?

Now “come home, come home” from the dial tone

Sung the fifth though the last conch shell

But the ocean’s recording had been just a tide outsourced.

The psychiatrist called it lover’s atrophy

But he doesn’t know I’m a tour de force.

The final pull is dragging at my hair,

My spine, a kite-string, long snapped somewhere over the Midwest

Tangled in the branches of a dead cherry tree

Like an overgrown tumbleweed.