Another Creature: Poems

Another Creature

Another Creature Because I was seventeen, eighteen, drunk beyond pain or surprise, I said go ahead and show me. Drive-in sky, car windows cranked down, swell of fresh bites rising pink on bare patches of belly and thigh. Violet dusk and darkening line of poplars past the screen, film slipping off its reel in long white stripes, the whine of warplanes lost to honking horns. Here’s how you make me feel, you said, and lowered your Marlboro just beyond the narrowing of wrist, the white snake’s throat. And brought it down slowly to give me a chance to flinch, but I did not flinch. You said you loved me as much as your mother, your spaniel, your new Camaro, and proof of it bubbled up clear on my skin, circle of bleached white moon crater ridged where burning ash met flesh and made this scar, here, when you were a boy and I was another creature. 10 ...