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Rachel McKibbens
Poem for Miss Meade
When I compare his wrists to a spoon handle, what I mean to say is: I can't have anything of my own, not even the soup. Every love poem is really a broken bone kaleidoscope, turning. The hands disguised as a knife fight disguised as a pile of fruit in my lap have finally rotted down to their wrinkled wood pits and my tongue hasn't the heart to make knots of all these stems. Instead, it replaces the words forgive me with axe handle, substitutes flesh with an undiscovered sea machine. Every line designed to hurt a little less than its meaning. Which is why all the men I ever wanted have become the one time I slept
soundly in an empty house.
And Even Smaller Nails
I should probably tell you I know where you hide your diary. I forget what I was looking for when I found it. I think I was trying to find the insecticide, or maybe the green dress missing all of its buttons.
Sometimes I read it after we fight, when I've locked myself in our room. I never start from the beginning, just open it wherever it wants and go from there. I almost tore out June 11th once, on principle, but decided against it.
The parts about me are my favorite. I like how, each time you describe my body, it is as if it's the first time you've seen it— the gang of freckles orbiting my navel. My crooked pinky toe. The birthmark beneath my left breast, shaped like a tiny hammer.
The first time I read what you thought of my orgasms, I got pretty upset about it. Until last Thanksgiving, when your mother told me, over sweet potato pie, how much you used to love helping your father slaughter the chickens. How you would take off all your clothes & chase them around the yard, Screaming like a savage. How sometimes you'd come to the dinner table, face painted in blood, a bright white feather tucked behind each ear.
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