Did You Hear the One About the Single Mother with the Drinking Problem

Ain’t shit to do on a Saturday night but walk the hairpin bend in the river,

bulge on the sand of narcotics. It all sugar-shocked in cosmological still.

 

We tongue. Until slant. Until bubblesnap—the moment I could tell you

about him and his jeezis smile and the cancer he put in my stomach.

 

Or the entire summer I spent saturated on the sugary dapples of moonshine.

All their fingers and how they dripped with excess, the words like turpentine.

 

A river and a bend. How the pulsing band of water loses the stars. And here,

the gut swing, the whicker whisper to keep the inside on the inside.

 

Or the vertebrae unzip. Or the miracle metastasize. And here, the ozone

wrings its fingers tight round the earth’s blush, swollen salt of birth.