DM
153
Stephanie Bryant Anderson
Poetry
from
Staring at a Dead Bird in a Wendy’s Parking Lot
I stood over it in the parking lot—deafened
at the dead bird whose wings shriveled
and tore like a thick cord of tobacco.
The eyes squeezed plum juice—rotten
fruit trapping the soul from coming or going,
though the brain so easily stopped.
The bird could do nothing. The neck, broken,
craned as if looking for someone it didn’t want to miss.
I recalled the night in the living room, when
my grandmother got out of bed
after taking her Ambien. She smiled sweetly
while watching The Miss America Pageant with us.
She went back to her room. She grabbed a hand mirror.
Walking back in, she stared at her ass.
See, I am just as beautiful as they are—
I’ve still got it, girls!
Then dropping her nightgown to the ground, posed
as a nude contestant, her pubic hairs, wiry, shaped
like the dead bird—its legs up and frozen—
the sounds from the TV wild with laughter.
He carries me in the biology of his body
I wrap the uncooked lamb in white paper to place back
in the fridge. The blood weeps through.
I imagine the knife—a plunging warship. The cesarean
that cut him out of me. The anodyne.
Like an umbilical, the onion-shaped corpuscles of my blood
attach to him, fill him with my phantoms.
Before dinner I tell him, no candy. Then—
I am going to kill myself. With a knife.
And I will scare you. He believes the knife
will bring relief. The blood. The slowing heart.
At times, his eyes are small rooms whose lights are out.
A darkness that even the cold doesn’t reach.
I have loved him from the inside. But
love alone does not help us.
Spoiling him, I gather him in the place where
our blood gathers, and put him in my bed to sleep.
We are drifting off—together.
I worry my blood is not warm enough—
My God, While Rummaging through the Attic
after Sandra Beasley
My god used to leave me love notes on the kitchen table.
I’ve gone to the store—be back soon. She didn’t want to wake me
or worry me, as she knew how I would hurt
thinking she was lost somewhere
between astronomy and agriculture. But this time,
my god didn’t come back.
When she comes to wander the house again my god
will ask why her clothes from the back closet
have gone missing. I don’t want to tell her we’ve
lied to her.
Listening to the New Testament on vinyl, my god
will hum a song I don’t know, while I remove
the dirt from her feet, her hands. Everything here
reminds me she has left—like the red and white
ceramic hen sitting in a box. My god used to pop off
its head and plant diamond earrings in the neck.
I have stolen the hen, but my god,
not for the diamonds.
In the attic, I read the registry from her funeral.
My God, I miss her—
Take Down the Clouds
When I almost drowned while swimming, your
tentacled arms covered me in scales—a pattern
of movement sequences repeated—and you returned
me, the drowned girl from water—my purplish skin
a wild iris wilting. I un-swallowed the vodka, and you
pushed the clouds back over the romantic moon
and argued that mermaids do not live inside
of every sad woman. Your belief in universal design
says I am the lungs. And you, the inseparable
breath moving through to keep me alive.
I saw you in the sky—Spica—my binary star—
the brightest star in Virgo. Even in mother-water,
you didn’t leave me, you pulled me along, giving me
constellations and harmonies to live in,
and touched my toes to the bottom of the pool.
You’ve never let me slip away—my body smooth as a pearl.
Into the Icy Field Again
Rows of corn keep snow from the road—
the long mound like a fresh grave.
How womanly the field guards herself, expecting
to keep the afterimage in her husks.
But—
the ground dutifully accepts grief.
Slipping down, the sun
knifes the day in half.
Afraid to sleep,
the smell of wet boots & blood fruit step in.
They come shaped as an open field plagued
by black irises—
an absorption of botany and anatomy.
In the field
a shadow fell like knees heavy to the ground.
I was a girl then. And now
my hands turn over and over inside themselves.
Stephanie Bryant Anderson is the founder of Red Paint Hill Publishing. She has worked also as editor with Up the Staircase Quarterly, Inkception Books, and she served on the Editorial Board for The Manatee, Southern New Hampshire University's literary journal. Nominated for Best of the Net, storySouth Million Writers Award, and twice for the Pushcart Prize, Stephanie is the mother to two amazing boys. Besides poetry she enjoys kickboxing and math.