Brandi Nicole Martin

DRUNKEN ASTEROPE MUSES ON A 5 MINUTE PHONE CALL FROM MEROPE
AT HALIFAX BEHAVIORAL HOSPITAL AFTER THE LATTER'S ATTEMPTED SUICIDE

I thought I saw her yesterday in an Isuzu, puttering
to a stop at the corner of Stymphalus and Hades, but no!

That was Monroe Street. And we are not history, we are
here now. At least, I am, sweat-covered scum of this Earth

missing our sisterly safe haven in the sky. And why
do lipstick-kissed cigarette butts crushed to the floor

of this dive bar seem a hundred bristled bones
in the bed of our forest? Her voice through my shitty

old cell phone isn't sentence, but song. Let us
separate the movement from the moving thing. Now,

I was never told what to do when ale tastes so damn
nice but then a pool table ignites, smoke ebbing,

then climbing and nobody notices all those cue balls
morph into lidless eyes orbiting around me in silence.

And I'd split scalp from bone, tear this whole place down
to bring her home before the time runs out, but until then

I swear to God I'll just live inside how her timid words
quake when the nurse tries to wrestle that lifeline away

And who's to say that even this barman won't be floored
by the weight of our goodbyes? Me adrift on that sea

of draft beer. My sister fettered to a sterile white bed,
a deluge of darts aimed straight for her head because

some doctor swears Valium could paralyze her flee
to where the leaves sing, where nymphs aren't afraid of

their dreams, where the waves taste of sleep and gasoline.

Brandi Nicole Martin's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kudzu Review and Espresso Ink. She was a winner in Kudzu's Fall 2011 Contest, and she currently lives and writes in Tallahassee, Fl