Daniel Lawless’s book, The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With and Other Poems, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry, February 2018. Recent poems
appear or are forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Asheville Review, Cortland Review, B O D Y, The Common, FIELD, frACtalia
(Romanian), Fulcrum, The Louisville Review, Manhattan Review, Numero Cinq, Pif, Adirondack Review, The Meadow, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. He is the founder and editor of Plume: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry.
Mid-Point
At the mid-point
Of my life I didn’t feel I was in a submarine
Silently crossing the International Date Line,
Nor get the sense of cinder-stitched allées stretching out
Between shadowy walls of phosphorescent foliage.
And I definitely didn’t see myself as a granite statue
Beating itself into an idea with a granite hammer.
Maybe I heard birdsong, but no bird.
Or maybe I was the bird and my birdsong
Was this: cries from some childhood playground,
A dull dental work ache like a provincial orchestra
Tuning up in my veins. Chair-scrapes
Followed by the roar of a gem-polishing machine.
The number 42, 42, 42, pronounced in Esperanto
As if a freezing prisoner in a courtyard
Was pleading for his life—
Kvardek du, kvardek du, kvardek du.
And, of course, the headwinds, howling in
From the North, starting to make a weathervane creak
Beneath a galloping horse that stands perfectly still.
Depression
It’s a bell curve, she’s saying,
This sweet doctor
With chipped scarlet fingernails
And big hair
Mouthing and pointing
As she swoops a made-up deaf-sign
For “hill”—some days she’ll be
Here, some here.
1983. In seven years
You’ll be dead, my sister
The sister who killed herself at sixteen.
Paroxetine, ECT, Paroxetine,
Notebook paper pictures
Of bare trees and fanged lizards
In bald Medicare therapists’ rooms
Our mute father
Will drive you to and from
In the pick-up lie ahead.
But for now there’s only
The three of us, M—
Staring at this phantom
Hill you’re somewhere on—
There or there—
A hill that isn’t a hill at all but maybe a bell
In the other sense too—
Calling all the kids back
From recess, ringing in the schoolyard,
A bell you can’t answer,
Just can’t.