I am so attractive
to you said the drunk
boy. Was it Halloween?
Montana: circa 2003.
No, you are so attracted
to me I corrected, left
the party for a man who
whistled his brown dog
into bed with us, called
me hot mama, drove me
to the bar and ordered brains
and eggs. I went from beer
to the bakery where I mixed
croissants and passed them
through the sheeter but never
stayed long enough to see them
rise. I should have paid attention
to that metaphor. I didn’t. I also didn’t
sleep with the marine who’d slept
with 62 women or the alcoholic who
drove me home so drunk we rode
the boulevard. I was still in love
with a man I’d loved three years, whole heart.
He now worked at the only co-op in town.
I’d go in to squeeze the avocados and there he’d be.
How reckless I was with my body then and how easy
with language. Poems drifting everywhere, my mattress
on the floor and my printer the most solid thing I knew.
A said, over naan and dal, she’d win the Pulitzer by thirty.
C turned her car into a truck and killed the friend beside her.
I wore Chacos and pounded out iambs and memorized “Pied Beauty.”
Stipple and brinded were words I had to learn. My teacher, over strawberries,
advised me to become a nurse. Words for a student who tried hard but probably wouldn’t
succeed. I wrote a poem about Herod’s wife, her impossible dream, thickened myself with gin
and the scraps of cake the bakers placed in a silver bowl above the timecards. Slow, sweet, sour,
adazzle, dim. Love isn’t always a carnival ride said the old lover when I finally slept with him. He had
another girlfriend then. Fickle, freckled. The poem ends with praise him but I couldn’t. I wanted to be
so loved and famous that I couldn’t stand the sight of me.
Kaethe Schwehn is the author of the postapocalyptic novel The Rending and the Nest (Bloomsbury) and the poetry collection Tanka & Me (Brain Mill). Her memoir Tailings (Cascade) won a Minnesota Book Award, and she teaches composition and creative writing at Saint Olaf College.
Photo by Olia Gozha on Unsplash