Pharmhouse

Your mother took me out to bottle-feed the cattle.

I came home to you & found the door swelled shut.

Maybe I couldn’t find a key. Maybe it was November.

Looking back, I found white lines to crush into horizons.

What’s meant to be the limit of what’s visible to us?

Couldn’t tow the winters straight. Couldn’t find the line.

I always turned the corner as the sky was falling in

to black or white again. The paper’s early headline

just another black out poem, a flurry of December

or a blurred April sky. Grape-eyed, purple, fat-lipped,

we were bad blood on the rise. We played the stakes

like vines & coiled our fists right through our mouths.

I dared you doubled over as a doppelganger sick in bed

to lick my legs to say the calves we named that summer

weren’t yet slaughtered but looking back to see if you would

say the tags weren’t numbered from the day you first laid

eyes on them. My pick-me-up, my free card, joyride, trusted

dive bar to break dawn. By heart I memorized your number

in the cell. Guarded, pacing, unaware of snow that settled

on the county jail, I guess my eyes were bigger than my heart.