Autumn Guest



Crickets and Rain

In the file 
of house or somber
whichever you don't remember,
blame the bed
the only shine in the room 
when it's made,
for no trust in sex or God.
The back against the wall curse 
is of pillows and train whistles 
that come back 
like rain.

A woman washing lye 
through sweaty sexed, 
webbed hair weaving,
now I come with fist and boot 
to stir the ashes,
open the memory 
like he opened my body,
stomping the bones. 

Closets are a funny thing.

What I am able to say 
is where the farm was,
how the river must 
have gotten into his dreams
drowning the crickets,
and sticks, reminding me
of my grandmother's legs 
and what mother has not come.



The Exact Yes

The house I confined my virginity to was condemned by the city.
Yesterday, it fell like the purple eye of dead,
staring the daughter-hood right out of me.
Today, I begin that house with my own curtain,
sew it in to an eyelid black as a mask,
black as the dark look of raccoon I do not wear well in public.

I don't remember one dream I had in that house.
There, I was the smallest rock, 
a dreamed pebble, heavy and dropped 
long from a distance.  The exact yes
is, I crashed. I was pressed 
out of style, an old suit
beneath dirty thumbnails,
the new creases I had...
Pressed, hard enough to remember this,
while the comets come and go 
outside my bedroom window.
I tell you stones can be cruel
and rigid things,
that die in the air they were born in.
Some things are thrown into their smoothness,
sentences, made up from specific little maps,
finding me, long after he was gone.

I did not lose my virginity,
question where it went,
like a house key, a wallet,
the baby I carried.
I did not give it either.

It slipped out of me like permission,
and self praise being half scandal,
there it was, a crimson heart,
sewn into the green-leafed pattern
of the nylon slipcover
on that raggedy old couch.
I am not inspired by this. 

I am singular in my returns.