Two Poems

by Laura Sobbott Ross

For Skittish, Wild Things

          Possessed by it, they rush off, whirl madly in circles,
          or stand still, as if turned to stone
                    —Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult

You live in a rowhouse downtown

where you say there’s voodoo and mold.

The Lord’s Prayer hangs in a frame by the door.

People move as if underwater here.

The neighborhood, a fluorescent grid,

buzzing, nettled in moths,

the collective croon of places where nothing

bigger than a twenty-dollar bill stays in the drawer

of a cash register, and pasties are the standard

issue of decorum for grieving expanses of skin.

You sleep while the sun levitates,

bitter and dreamless. Bruised, feeding on

smoke rings, you’ll remember none of it.

I keep a broken piece of your girlhood,

warm beneath my sternum, where it lies sacred,

a relic offered in petition to the saints.

Despise sounds like a plateau, don’t you think?

A natural habitat for skittish, wild things,

and not a word a girl would use against herself—

the chafing bones, the abiding taste of iron in her

throat. Didn’t I knit you whole in small stitches—

jangling needles and pink chords, a consortium

of soft lies? Sometimes I think about the cat—

a calico you’d loved and released to the trance

inside its own girl-cells. Wary, and left

to skulk oily puddles, kibble of glass and flint.

Moon throbbing like a car alarm.

Not fixed, you might say about the calico,

meaning the unaltered state that opens

one into another and another,

each strung on a sticky thread of afterbirth.

Pink fanged mouths poised in the night to suckle.

Their small, winded bodies, soft as warm bread.

Purge

          I.          Cutting

I think I can understand

the need for darkness

to howl open into a wound.

Better yet, the equilibrium

in someone else’s wide-eyed recoil:

What have you done to yourself?

Your skin, a soft palette beneath which

you’ve hardened. A canvas of deft strokes

razored in red. Nettles sting my tongue

when I try to speak about it, dark seeds

choked across my pillow. Gauze,

a flimsy construct between your room

and the hospital that terrible night

we got the call from your landlord.

The same lines carved into the dashboard

later when we took back your car. Letters

whose sharp strokes ran intersections: Fuck you

and it’s what I thought at red lights when I knew

some stranger might be watching me cry.

          II.          January Super Blood Wolf Moon

Purge. It’s been said about this

particular lunar energy—

Bald magnet, who could miss it,

red and heaving the tides?

My back is swept with shingles—

a word that feels barnacled,

as if I were a pier footing,

a shell, a hull in the shape of a woman

and her daughter in a window.

Stupid January super blood wolf moon.

If only it was fiction— these things

my daughter is telling me, terrible things

she’s rocked and tended inside

a ribcage hinged and swinging wide.

Her words, a coil of ash, like one of those

cheap gimmick fireworks— black snake

that just keeps writhing out, volumetric

slag ribbon expanding against a red moon

held like the smoldering tip of a match.

She speaks and speaks, and I arc and char.

^{Image by Erika Lowe on Unsplash}