by Sandra Yannone
The green, translucent bottle
glistened
in the sunlight
as it careened
past my left ear,
then shattered
on the asphalt,
scattering
like mice under siege
by the neighborhood cat
or a jigsaw puzzle
falling
from its fallible box.
The glass bottle
that broken afternoon
on my driveway
in Lincoln, Nebraska
somehow broke
into me.
You could shake me
for years
like a dropped thermos
hear
the percussive
internal
bleeding
and discern that those scars
doubled once
as entry wounds
ushering that day
into my DNA
forever.
And yet how soon
I forgot
that the glass was still there
burrowed inside me
as I keep
shaking today, the illusion
that the mercury
was dropping its red
spiked delirium
to quell my fevered
American heart.
I’d rather the county
put one of its outlaw guns
to my head
and pull
the trigger
than lever after lever
behind a pleated, plastic curtain,
all that election-night red
on the map
screened through
my bloodshot eyes
when I told my body
never to let me
bleed like that again.
And I regret that I can’t
keep my pledge of allegiance.
And I regret that any rope
cast my way
slithers
through my hands, burning
red rivers like the poisonous
black snake
that bores through North Dakota
threatening
the land’s indigenous skin
and ancestral prayers.
And where am I now?
I can’t find the one I love
in a crowded hall
when I most need a head
to land
on my shoulder –
not a head
riddled with bullets,
dead and unthinking,
not one or forty-nine
blindsided at an Orlando dance
club in June,
not one or too many
and counting
slabbed in county morgues
with police bullets lodged
in their backs.
The weight of these dead
is too much
for my shoulder.
And isn’t this irrational?
And isn’t this
granting a grand gift
to fear?
And now she
who staunched
my bleeding
may feel the cold-case need
to stay away
from my bed.
And now any hand I extend
to invite her closer
feels nullified
by sixty-million pairs of eyes.
They boycott my sequels.
They steal
my lunch money.
They break
my Partridge Family thermos
in the back of the bus.
And so what if all this
sounds
like overblown despair?
If I can’t kiss my way
to shatter the glass sky
without having
the neighborhood kid
throw a soda bottle at my head,
if I can’t criss-cross
every inch of this county
that is her body,
if I fear the loss
of that freedom in broad
strokes of daylight,
then let me be
clear:
despair it is.
But despair is just
one bus stop
on this long ride home. And
I won’t stay
shattered here
for long.
Created: November 11, 2016
Age: 52
State: Washington
Sandra Yannone grew up on the coast of Connecticut with a daily view of Long Island Sound. Her poetry and book reviews have appeared in numerous journals including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Gay and Lesbian Review (Worldwide), Women’s Review of Books, Calyx, and Lambda Book Report. Her poem “Requiem for Orlando” was featured in the August 2017 special issue of Glass: A Poetry Journal responding to the Pulse nightclub shootings. Currently, she is Member of the Faculty and directs the Writing Center at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA.