by Charlotte Pence

What is on your bedside table? In your fridge?
Your hedge? Are you the type who searches
for a robin’s egg and its crumbs, or for a bone
with which to beat a brass band’s drum?

What is your first memory, first kiss,
first fist in your own mouth? The fourth?
What is your thirst? How do you prefer your light,
shaken or stirred? Bright or broken?

What is your yours, the unsayable, the
immeasurable, the thing your ex-lovers miss?
They’ll never admit what it is, so you’re left
to list songs for your funeral as if the notes know

who you are, who is on your nightstand, who
is rotting in your fridge. Who is wearing your
old prom dress as a costume, the dress you once
called yours, the dress you once declared was so you.

____________________________________________________________

by Charlotte Pence

It’s too early for the new
hurricane season, yet warnings
flood my phone. New Orleans’
tug boat bellows blocks away.
Amid the paleness of morning
mimosas, the bedpost anchors.
Storm alerts confirm:
hurricane is headed our way.
But I’m already cracking
crab legs and contemplating
eleven years of marriage.
Of what no longer holds
a charge. A text interrupts:
“Your stepfather’s health is
deteriorating quickly.”
My stepfather’s neighbor
“just wants me to know.”
How it always returns to small
cubes of raw fish placed before us,
oil’s admiration for the surface
of things, daughters who slowly
stop kissing goodbye. What is
goodbye when Facebook chooses
memories to return to me?
We push on, down damp
streets, scent of urine on brick.
Sax notes rising up like my blister,
shiny as lighting—
none of which will photo.
At the street corner, an upturned
bucket sticks out its tongue
to become a drum, pounding us
to another place: past trips with other
downpours that laughed, that ducked.
Is this marriage, or is it
raining again? My mother texts
“Don’t worry, relax,” so we pose
a video, scoff at cocktails
in neon plastic penises, praise
weathered flamingo-pink shutters,
ignore what shutters do
when they’re shut, when they’re screwed,
the storm’s percussive wanting in and in.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________