For Sandy, Who Never Got Her Dance
What you’re told: it was rat poison,
a little more and she’d have thrown it up. Instead
her mother decorates her grave out in Carrollton
at Hickory Grove every Christmas, has for the last
forty years. So you go, because you’re fifteen
and there are worse traditions than a dead girl
who wanted a boy’s damp hand against her back
before he deployed, had only meant it enough
to scare them, make them regret not letting her go.
What you’re not told: this is only one version
of grief, and it’s electricity haunts the pine thicket;
the injustice in re-hanging wreathes
older than a person feels like a fuck you
to the chances of days, the accidental graze
of life’s sweet ass and songs even stars dance to—
that you’ll want to burn it, the dented
reindeer antlers each inch of limp garland, the guestbook,
filled with names who came flaunting their pulses—
that you won’t understand how headlights
can be desperate, how for every bloodflooded chest
there’s a gymnasium, with cardboard cutout stars
falling from its rafters, faking the night sky.
For My Mother, Who Didn’t Provide a Forwarding Address
Every two hick town has orphaned mailboxes:
bills, coupons, TV Guide subscriptions scattered
over the hot blind earth, so no one thought
to wander down the gravel to your house,
decaying among overgrown persimmons and witch alder—
close enough to notice frayed window screens
under your carport or grume smudges on their panes.
I open the door you didn’t bother to lock, when you moved
to Memphis with the truck driver from Wisconsin,
which sends a Diet Coke can, its tab inside, clinking
into the dining room past dried dog shit and the leftover
dead: Abby, muzzle full of blowflies, intestinal fluids
seeped onto kitchen’s cheap vinyl, maggots dragging
the beds of her sockets, teeth still rooted
to blood drained gums, green-boned ribs
sticking out from her gas cracked chest.
The other two, Chinese Cresteds, side by side,
one further along than the other, both bloated
and stiff with rigor, lying beside a heap
of empty Marlboro cartons and fast food wrappers.
Outside, dirt dobbers buzz above the nest-ridden concrete
and grandmother’s Sweet Narcissus lean
against the porch. Belonging to you is a sucker punch,
and there is an us that won’t go beyond today,
except when I feel you in my habits:
when the coffee strainer grows green mold
in my maker, cigarette filters slosh
at the bottoms of months old bottles, and dead fruit flies
confetti my refrigerator— or when I feel
some faint umbilical current, from a day tinted
with dogwood pollen; filled with grass juice smell,
when you held me steady on your shoulders, while I plucked
pears, hanging from the highest branches
and gathered them in the folds of your redwarm skirt.
Maari Carter is originally from Winona, MS and attended The University of Mississippi where she received a B.A. in English. She is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Florida State University.
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