You have choices, all kinds of arson to commit.
I mean, you’ve gotta burn the old for the new to grow,
and I want to help you:
I practice, flicking lighters,
dropping lit matches out windows.
You might say you hate everyone but you never meant
ignite a witch in a bonfire. You never
meant swaddle her in rags
and drop her in the river; never meant
pack her in a suitcase, check her in like baggage.
I want to say that I knelt alone at the window all winter
as the plenilune sky stained the snow
Chartres Blue. But really, if the winter ever came this winter
I spent it sprawled out on my couch getting drunk,
watching football, while she gifted you
granite hills veiled white.
She was—is—sure as a sure thing gets and I’m proverbial,
always a bridesmaid. Bride feels impossible.
Like trying to exorcise the moon from the sky.
Like trying to write about the moon without using the word moon
in any language.
I’m clone-costumed and dyed-to-match
and she’s slim and white and diamond
and I say she’s a cunt to the back of your head
to get a reaction and you’ve got her
got arson on your blue, blue mind
and she’s a blue thing short of a wedding
and I’m in a car driving over a bridge known for suicides
and Van Halen’s “Jump” is playing on the radio.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 16, Issue 2.
Karen Locascio is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. Her work has appeared in Amethyst Arsenic, Spry Literary Journal, Rufous City Review, Breakwater Review, and The Holiday Cafe. She loves Boston and calls it home but will always be a Jersey Girl at heart.
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