It’s a Nasty Habit and I’m Trying to Quit

By HOLLY BURDORFF

 

I thought you were dead.

On your Facebook wall,

well-wishes and then nothing.

The mitosis of what if:

worries twirl and spiral

and settle into clock-cogs

which lock and jam.  

The metal creaks and smacks.

Spins, orbits, pulses.

My fingers catch, my nails bleed.

I couldn’t pick you out of a lineup now.

I hope you’ve found

your still pile of bones

to rub against.

You filled my lungs

with asterisks and commas

and lately I fear my cunt

is a dying star. I fear

it is packing to leave me.

Please know you’re allowed

to remember me by things

other than bacon

and my forgetting to turn off the lights.

I want you to remember

the time we folded a summer sun

into a winter sky and sewed

sequins onto strangers’ shoes.

Not by my constant pleas:

drive safe, come inside me, 

open this jar. I remember you

by your hair, spare straw

in a November field.

And by your soft uncorking of wine,

like grandpas popping cheeks at toddlers.

If you come back,

I’ll tongue-kiss you where your legs meet,

conjure tempests

when you’re sun-sick & weary.

I’ll twist under you

like rosepetals dropped into a creek.

 

[Purchase Issue 13 here]

Holly Burdorff is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. She serves as art and design editor for Black Warrior Review and as director of the VIDA Count, and her poems appear in inter|rupture, POOL, Pittsburgh Poetry Houses, and Duende.

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It’s a Nasty Habit and I’m Trying to Quit

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