Free Two Bowls of Milk by Stephanie Bolster Page A

you will lean
    away from light, shrink
    into your crippled shadow.
Beach Sweet Pea
    Tenacious as cat’s claws
    you cling to the salt
    grit, mark your place
    in roots and the innermost
    pink of anemone’s
    tentacles. Beside that dropped
    starfish with its guts to the sky,
    that branch bleached
    and sea-worn,
    you are the one
    who holds brine between your toes,
    tide in your teeth.
Oriental Poppy
    The truth is in the red of you,
    the black centre wide
    as a pupil in a blind-drawn room.
    Bloodshot, you stare
    into the sky and will not squint
    until the sun does.
RED STILETTO
    “Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.”
          – Charles Simic, “Our Angelic Ancestor”
    Something here –
    Nike runner with its arc
    of dreamed flight, feathered
    bedroom slipper, red
    stiletto with the pointed toe,
    arrows into darkness.
    The bodies have hopped between
    dumpsters, between these bookshelves.
    Hissing cats, torn pages, milk
    cartons licked blank.
    They have unwritten
    their other legs. They believe in silence
    and the striving after balance.
    Somewhere in there
    they stand like resting flamingoes,
    tuck around them
    the memory of the other leg
    like a cruel friendship
    lost in childhood. Phantom phrases still
    caught in their knotted tongues.
ASSONANCE
    Hurt bird in dirt
– she writes
    for sound, and a sparrow
    that hit the window of her childhood
    too hard. Because of how the ear
    takes words in and holds them
    to itself, how they strike
    those bones:
hammer, anvil
    and
stirrup
. Words that conjure
    machinery, weight,
    horses, that morning her leg
    caught and the mare dragged her
    for miles. From the first,
    each word she’d learned
    a hoof just missing her
    temple. It is all pain,
    the reddish shell the side
    of the head cups, and hears
    itself, hears itself.
LOST THINGS POKE THROUGH MELTING SNOW
    Stunted remnants of plants, months-old dogshit, a single red mitten that belonged to a girl who’d been punished for the loss, one hand made to go bare the rest of that winter. When her mother, tending tulip shoots, found the mitten, she pinned it to the girl’s chest, broke the skin so she would not forget. The next winter they found the girl’s heart, grey and hard as stone, in the centre of a thrown snowball. It nearly blinded the boy. In the kitchen they set the heart beside the turkey wishbone, meatless and saved for later. Microwaved on low, stroked with new white towels, it thawed into the pumping of nothing through itself. In the hospital they returned it wrapped in sheets and anaesthesia, stitched deep, a gift she could not return. The next year she went walking in her red rubber boots until only a trail of hollow exclamation marks was left.
THIS IS THE WEEK OF DEAD THINGS
    By the lake I find a mole unearthed, mouth raw as supermarket steak. Its body is a cylinder furred with the passive half of Velcro. Its feet curled pink as a bird’s.
    A friend says he has killed two mice in as many days. He wakes to the snap and finds one caught behind the eyes, dancing its last dance. Afterwards it’s hardly a heft in his palm, less than a skipping stone.
    I find the fish plucked eyeless and scaleless where the tide has left. It might have been perch or flounder, might have been angelfish. Wind stirs no inch of it. Sand sifts around it. This is the longest its fins have been anywhere.
    When I visit my friend, a car hits a crow, and the street’s a sudden gathering of crows. For half an hour outside his window black eyes watch the curb and that black unflapping thing. Then they’re gone. I leave behind my half-drained teacup.
    This evening each thing dies before me. A bundle of muddy newsprint is a chewed raccoon’s tail and those distant blown shreds of tire by the roadside, what’s left of a bear.
    How could I not turn away from the precious bald head of that man waiting in the bus shelter?
EDGE OF THE RIVER
    Tamarack, shamrock,
    black water with a stone in its throat. Black willow:
    Very